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.
Interpretation
It takes significant knowledge to teach those who are already educated, but an even greater level of understanding is necessary to reach those who have not received proper guidance.
Horace Mann emphasizes the challenges faced by educators in reaching students who have not had the benefit of previous instruction. He implies that teaching those who have been neglected requires not only a deep understanding of the subject matter but also an awareness of the varied life experiences and backgrounds of those learners. The quote underlines the importance of investing in knowledge and understanding to effectively teach and uplift those who are underserved.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech addressing the importance of educational reform.
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.
Virtue is an angel, but she is a blind one, and must ask Knowledge to show her the pathway that leads to her goal.
Genius may conceive but patient labor must consummate.
Libraries are starting places for the adventure of learning that can go on whatever one's vocation and location in life. Reading is an adventure like that of discovery itself. Libraries are our base camp.
I read because one life isn't enough and in the pages of a book, I can be anybody.
The education of youth should be watched with the most scrupulous attention. [I]t is much easier to introduce and establish an effectual system ... than to correct by penal statutes the ill effects of a bad system. ... The education of youth ... lays the foundations on which both law and gospel rest for success.
A book is one of the most patient of all man's inventions. Centuries mean nothing to a well-made book. It awaits its destined reader, come when he may, with eager hand and seeing eye. Then occurs one of the great examples of union, that of a man with a book, pleasurable, sometimes fruitful, potentially world-changing, simple; and in a library...witho ut cost to the reader.
One has to grow up with good talk in order to form the habit of it.
I've got a 12-year-old grandson who, when he was 3 years old, before he could say many other words, could name the different kinds of dinosaurs.
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