Come with me back in time two-hundred years. We’re standing on a busy cobble-stone street in Maryland. Do you see the little black boy kneeling on the pavement, persuading some poor white children to teach him to read a few words in exchange for bread? Imagine again the boy in his master’s library, sneaking to read a forbidden book. Now watch him with his fellow slaves, laboring through the alphabet, risking punishment. Will you whisper in his ear, “You’re wasting your time”? Years pass, and now you lean over his shoulder to see the papers of a free man in his hand—a confident and literate free man. This former slave is Frederick Douglass, one of the first renowned African American speakers and writers.
It’s so tempting to take for granted the things that we have never been denied. Education is one of those things. Today, people forget that education is a privilege, not a prison. True education teaches students to think for themselves and to communicate those thoughts. If the purpose of education were only to get a diploma or degree, it would be a waste of time and money, but education isn’t a stamp on paper; it’s a pathway to freedom, opening our eyes to the world around us, to goodness, beauty, and change and also to poverty, injustice, and death. Unshackled from ignorance, we possess the power to improve our communities and, together, our world. Thankfully, education is within our reach today. I plan to seize it with gusto!
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