The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [175]
Tyrants and autocrats have always understood that literacy, learning, books and newspapers are potentially dangerous. They can put independent and even rebellious ideas in the heads of their subjects. The British Royal Governor of the Colony of Virginia wrote in 1671:
I thank God there are no free schools nor printing; and I hope we shall not have [them] these [next] hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them and libels against the best government. God keep us from both!
But the American colonists, understanding where liberty lies, would have none of this.
In its early years, the United States boasted one of the highest -perhaps the highest - literacy rates in the world. (Of course, slaves and women didn’t count in those days.) As early as 1635, there had been public schools in Massachusetts, and by 1647 compulsory education in all townships there of more than fifty ‘households’. By the next century and a half, educational democracy had spread all over the country. Political theorists came from other countries to witness this national wonder: vast numbers of ordinary working people who could read and write. The American devotion to education for all propelled discovery and invention, a vigorous democratic process, and an upward mobility that pumped the nation’s economic vitality.
Today, the United States is not the world leader in literacy. Many of those judged literate are unable to read and understand very simple material - much less a sixth-grade textbook, an instruction manual, a bus schedule, a mortgage statement, or a ballot initiative. And the sixth-grade textbooks of today are much less challenging than those of a few decades ago, while the literacy requirements at the workplace have become more demanding than ever before.
The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness and low self-esteem mesh to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. We all bear the cost of keeping it running. Illiteracy is its linchpin.
Even if we hardened our hearts to the shame and misery experienced by the victims, the cost of illiteracy to everyone else is severe - the cost in medical expenses and hospitalization, the cost in crime and prisons, the cost in special education, the cost in lost productivity and in potentially brilliant minds who could help solve the dilemmas besetting us.
Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom. But reading is still the path.
Frederick Douglass After the Escape
When he was barely twenty, he ran away to freedom. Settling in New Bedford with his bride, Anna Murray, he worked as a common labourer. Four years later Douglass was invited to address a meeting. By that time, in the North, it was not unusual to hear the great orators of the day - the white ones, that is - railing against slavery. But even many of those opposed to slavery thought of the slaves themselves as somehow less than human. On the night of 16 August 1841, on the small island of Nantucket, the members of the mostly Quaker Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society leaned forward in their chairs to hear something new: a voice raised in opposition to slavery by someone who knew it from bitter personal experience.
His very appearance and demeanour destroyed the then-prevalent myth of the ‘natural servility’ of African-Americans. By all accounts his eloquent analysis of the evils of slavery was