Two decades before the original Department of Education met its untimely end, Horace Mann penned the report that contained the quote that he is best, perhaps exclusively, known for: “Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance wheel of the social machinery.” Today, his words land as the sort of human capital thinking that has dominated education and career discourse for decades…. And yet Mann’s famous line was intended as a warning about the dire inequality that threatened to consume the country. “The distance between the two extremes of society is lengthening, instead of being abridged,” Mann also wrote. “With every generation, fortunes increase on the one hand, and some new privation is added to poverty on the other.”
