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The Role Of Education In Frederick Douglass

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Getting a good education can easily be the foundation for a successful future and windows of opportunity opening for you as a citizen. However in the case of blacks during slave times of America, it was not that structured. Receiving an education as a black slave, no matter the situation, was deemed unlawful as well as highly frowned upon by whites. Those getting an education had to do so under cautious limitations, and if caught, would face severe punishment by their master. Despite the image painted that getting an education was completely impossible, Frederick Douglass managed to put himself above others intellectually, benefiting not only himself with his accomplishments. Assisted ironically, by his master’s wife, Douglass was able to get a basic education for a …show more content…

Summatively, Douglass was able to pioneer the idea that education opened doors for enslaved people in the United States, backed with the idea that knowledge is power and power is freedom. Frederick Douglass was an enslaved African much like many thousands around him. Moving from plantation to plantation, experiencing the wraths of various masters, it seemed Douglass was a typical slave, undistinguished from the crowd. However, upon Douglass’s arrival to Mr. and Mrs. Auld’s plantation in Baltimore, he [Douglass] was greeted with a surprising experience. Douglass’s new mistress, Mrs. Auld was a kinder woman compared and sought to spread knowledge rather than pain. Stated in his experiences coming to the Auld’s home, “she very kindly

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Douglass says, “To wit, It was a grand achievement, I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to liberty” (36). Frederick is saying education when he talks about an achievement. Slave owners would not educate their slaves because if they did, the slaves would have a much better chance of escaping from their masters. One of the ways that they would need education to escape was the passes that they could write to show to the police and other people on the road that they were being sent by their masters.

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Although Frederick Douglass was not expected to be literate, he taught himself how because he believed that education should be for everyone, not just a few privileged children. Frederick Douglass was a slave for life in the southern United States before the Civil War. He had no regular teacher because, at that time, most slave owners did not believe that their slaves should be taught to read and write. White slave owners thought that if slaves knew how to read, they would go against their owners and fight against slavery.

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If Ms. Auld didn’t teach Douglass how to write his path to freedom wouldn’t have even started. “After I had learned this, she assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters. Just at this point of my progress, Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further” (40). When Douglass got older and wanted to be a free slave his knowledge came in much handy to help his friends and even himself to escape. “The week before our intended start, I wrote several protections, one for each of us” (78).

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