But slavery makes the general education of the whites impossible.
Horace Mann
The Public Record
Horace Mann was an American educational reformer, abolitionist and Whig politician known for his commitment to promoting public education; he is thus also known as The Father of American Education. In 1848, after public service as Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, Mann was elected to the United States House of Representatives (1848–1853). From September 1852 to his death in 1859, he served as President of Antioch College.
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Where this cultivation exists, no matter how barren the soil or ungenial the clime, there comfort and competence will abound; for it is the intellectual and moral condition of the cultivator that impoverishes the soil or makes it teem with…
The universal cultivation of the mind and heart is the only true source of opulence;--the cultivation of the mind, by which to lay hold on the treasures of nature; the cultivation of the heart, by which to devote those treasures to…
Not the most fertile soil, not mines of silver and gold, can make a nation rich, without intelligence.
The larger capital, in the form of intelligence, yielded the larger interest in the form of wages.
The slave worker is forever prying at the short end of Nature’s lever, and using the back instead of the edge of her finest instruments.
An educated man uses the same mine to print a million of books.
Ignorant slaves stand upon a coal mine, and to them it is only a worthless part of the inanimate earth.
An educated man surpasses the ancient idea of a river god; he stands by the Penobscot, the Kennebec, the Merrimack, or the Connecticut; he commands each of them to do more work than could be performed by a hundred thousand men,--to saw…
Without a cultivated intellect, man is among the weakest of all the dynamical forces of nature; with a cultivated intellect, he commands them all.
Instead of ten thousand fingers, he has given us genius inventive of the power loom and the printing press.
Instead of a telescopic and microscopic eye, he has given us power to invent the telescope and the microscope.
But, instead of iron arms, and Atlantean shoulders, and the lungs of Boreas, he has given us a mind, a soul, a capacity of acquiring knowledge, and thus of appropriating all these energies of nature to our own use.
He would have given us lungs by which we could blow fleets before us, and wings to sweep over ocean wastes.
Had he intended us for bearing burdens, he would have given us Atlantean shoulders, by which we could carry the vast freights of rail-car and steamship, as a porter carries his pack.
Had God designed the human muscles to do the work of the world, then, instead of the ingredients of gunpowder or gun cotton, and the expansive force of heat, he would have given us hands which could take a granite quarry and break its…
Had God intended that the work of the world should be done by human bones and sinews, he would have given us an arm as solid and strong as the shaft of a steam engine; and enabled us to stand, day and night, and turn the crank of a…
And all these energies are given us on one condition,--the condition of intelligence, that is, of education.
The velocity of winds, the weight of waters, and the rage of steam, are powers, each one of which is infinitely stronger than all the strength of all the nations and races of mankind, were it all gathered into a single arm.
The application of water, and wind, and steam, to the propulsion of machinery, and to the transportation of men and merchandise from place to place, has added ten thousand fold to the actual products of human industry.
Caloric, gravitation, expansibility, compressibility, electricity, chemical affinities and repulsions, spontaneous velocities,--these are the mighty agents which the intellect of man harnesses to the car of improvement.
They do not come wholly or principally from the original, unassisted strength of the human arm, but from the employment, through intelligence and skill, of those great natural forces with which the bountiful Creator has filled every part…
Whence come our necessaries and our luxuries?--those comforts and appliances that make the difference between a houseless, wandering tribe of Indians in the far west, and a New England village.
God has filled the earth and imbued the elements with energies of greater power than that of all the inhabitants of a thousand planets like ours.
It was not the design of Providence that the work of the world should be performed by muscular strength.
Politicians like Horace Mann
