EMT’s Eng1A Weblog

I have to agree with Douglas’ theory on why it was not allowed for slaves to be educated. In the following passage taken from this weeks reading it states: “Douglass is keenly aware of his story’s great irony: that the white masters who tried to prevent slaves from being educated on the grounds that it would make them unfit for slavery were absolutely correct.” Douglas insisted that education went hand in hand with freedom; therefore the only way to keep people enslaved was to prevent them from learning and acquiring knowledge. If slaves were given the same opportunities as other people to be educated and learn how to read and write along with learning of issues within society they would have come across the same issues that Douglas found when he started reading the book The Columbian Orator. In this book which had a collection of great speeches, poems, soliloquies, and occasional pieces used to teach rhetoric and public speaking, Douglas learned of a perplexing truth – that the same country who had enslaved him had also fought a revolution in the name of freedom, which in turn lead him to call attention to the hypocrisy of slavery in a nation founded on principles, as he states, of “justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence.” As Douglas becomes more and more educated he starts to realize all the bad stuff that is going on and at one point almost wishes he had still been as naive as other uneducated slaves because then he wouldn’t have had to actually experience and see what he was learning first hand. As he quotes, “I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.” In the time of slavery it was such a common thing for wealthy people to have slaves – it probably would have been a like a slap in the face for a slave to be more educated then their master.  

One of eighteenth century’s most influential liberal writers, Jean-Jaeques Rousseau, had great faith in humanity’s goodness and believed that society and government corrupted people’s innate nobility. In his novel Emile, or on Education, Rosseau makes his most famous statement: “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.” He believed that humans naturally care for each other through an inborn sense of compassion, but that the mechanisms of society work against their natural inclinations and makes people self-interested and uncaring. In Book 1 of his novel he states that everything a person lacks at birth is eventually given to them through education.

I think that the fact that Rousseau believed that society and government are responsible for corrupting the goodness in people could somewhat be true. A lot of what people decisions are based on come by examples of the people around them and the society they live in. For example, as a small child growing up you will learn by the examples of others around you whether it’s good or bad, that is something  you don’t know for sure or even understand – but the only thing you know for sure is that is what is told to you and how everyone else around you is acting so you follow it thinking that’s how you are supposed to act too.