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.
All children start their school careers with sparkling imaginations, fertile minds, and a willingness to take risks with what they think.
A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever.
Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.
The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through, to avoid.
Each time I visit such a classroom, where the teacher is more interested in creating a democratic community than in maintaining her position of authority, Iβm convinced all over again that moving away from consequences and rewards isnβt just realistic - itβs the best way to help kids grow into good learners and good people.
It appears to me that if one wants to make progress in mathematics, one should study the masters and not the pupils.
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