So much, then, my friends, is done, in the common and established course of nature, for the welfare of our children. Nature supplies a perennial force, unexhausted, inexhaustible, re-appearing whenever and wherever the parental relation exists. We, then, who are engaged in the sacred cause of education, are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause; and, just as soon as we can make them see the true relation in which they and their children stand to this cause, they will become advocates for its advancement, more ardent and devoted than ourselves. We hold every parent by a bond more strong and faithful than promises or oaths, - by a Heaven-established relationship, which no power on earth can dissolve. Would parents furnish us with a record of their secret consciousness, how large a portion of those solemn thoughts and emotions, which throng the mind in the solitude of the night-watches, and fill up their hours of anxious contemplation, would be found to relate to the welfare of their offspring!
Horace Mann, Page 210.
John Dewey described Mann as "the patron saint of progressive education."
https://progressingamerica.blogspot.com/2011/08/reformers-in-education-your-children.html
If the goal of writing is to clearly convey an idea in the clearest terms, Horace Mann was a piss poor writer.