The earth flourishes, or is overrun with noxious weeds and brambles, as we apply or withhold the cultivating hand. So fares it with the intellectual system of man.
Interpretation
The state of the earth and human intellect depends on whether we nurture them or let them grow wild.
Horace Mann compares the cultivation of the earth to the development of the human intellect, suggesting that both require care and attention to thrive. If we neglect our intellectual growth, just as we can neglect a garden, we may fall victim to negativity and stagnation, represented metaphorically by weeds and brambles.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of education, one might quote this to emphasize the need for nurturing young minds.
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.
We have to move back to the idea that education isn't about teaching people to bow to rigid rules. That's not what democracy is about.
One test of the correctness of educational procedure is the happiness of the child.
Everyone [in higher education] was what I call drillers of deeper wells. These academics sit at the bottom of a deep well and they look up and see a sliver of the sky. They know everything about that little sliver of sky and nothing else. I scan all my horizons.
I went to an extreme for literary purposes because I felt all the self-help books out there were so gooey and Pollyanna-ish and nauseating. It was making me angry.
Any teaching of falsehoods in science classes should certainly be identified and stopped by school inspectors. School inspectors should be looking at science teachings to make sure they are evidence-based science.
One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself.
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