Horace Mann
Horace Mann (1796 – 1859) was an American educational reformer and Whig politician dedicated to promoting public education. He served in the Massachusetts State legislature (1827–37). In 1848, after public service as Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, Mann was elected to the United States House of Representatives (1848–53). About Mann’s intellectual progressivism, the historian Ellwood P. Cubberley said:
"No one did more than he to establish in the minds of the American people the conception that education should be universal, non-sectarian, free, and that its aims should be social efficiency, civic virtue, and character, rather than mere learning or the advancement of education ends."
Arguing that universal public education was the best way to turn unruly American children into disciplined, judicious republican citizens, Mann won widespread approval from modernizers, especially in the Whig Party, for building public schools. Most states adopted a version of the system Mann established in Massachusetts, especially the program for normal schools to train professional teachers. Educational historians credit Horace Mann as father of the Common School Movement.
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“No man has the right to bring up children without surrounding them with books.”
“Give me a house furnished with books rather than furniture! Both, if you can, but books at any rate!”
“Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year.”
“A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.”
“It is well to think well: it is divine to act well.”
“Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.”
“We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.”
“Education...beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of conditions of men --the balance wheel of the social machinery...It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich; it prevents being poor.”
“Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen”
“Lost, yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered for they are gone forever.”
“Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves.”
“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
“Do not think of knocking out another person's brains because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago.”
“A house without books is like a room without windows.”