When the panting and thirsting soul first drinks the delicious waters of truth, when the moral and intellectual tastes and desires first seize the fragrant fruits that flourish in the garden of knowledge, then does the child catch a glimpse and foretaste of heaven.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the profound joy and fulfillment that comes from discovering knowledge and truth.
Horace Mann highlights the transformative experience of gaining knowledge and understanding, portraying it as a source of nourishment for the soul. The quote suggests that when individuals, particularly children, engage with truth and knowledge, they experience a taste of something divine and fulfilling, akin to a glimpse of heaven.
In practice
Use this quote in a speech about the importance of education in personal development.
Under the Providence of God, our means of education are the grand machinery by which the 'raw material' of human nature can be worked up into inventors and discoverers, into skilled artisans and scientific farmers, into scholars and jurists, into the founders of benevolent institutions, and the great expounders of ethical and theological science.
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
There may be frugality which is not economy. A community, that withholds the means of education from its children, withholds the bread of life and starves their souls.
Let us labor for that larger comprehension of truth, and that more thorough repudiation of error, which shall make the history of mankind a series of ascending developments.
Great knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been well instructed, but still greater knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been neglected.
Virtue is an angel, but she is a blind one, and must ask Knowledge to show her the pathway that leads to her goal.
One test of the correctness of educational procedure is the happiness of the child.
Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today. Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction. See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.
One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.
A book is completed only when it is finished by a reader.
All provisions of federal, state or local law requiring or permitting discrimination in public education must yield.
My modus operandi hasn't really changed that much from when I was an English teacher. I wanted my students to leave my classroom loving reading and wanting to read more, and if they left my classroom thinking that reading is boring, then I haven't done my job.
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