Hsun Tzu Encouraging Learning Analysis

As I first began to read “Encouraging Learning” by Hsun Tzu I thought the piece to be informative. The reading stated off with a back story in which I had believed it to be there to help the reader with a little understanding, but as I continued to read I found the reading to be very persuasive. I say this because of the examples he had given and how he talks about human nature. Hsun Tzu felt as if humans are evil by nature and that if people followed natures natural calling without mentally and physically challenging oneself to advance educationally they won’t be able to produce anything good, because only by conscious activities can we achieve virtue. Hsun Tzu stated, “A gentleman will take care in selecting the community he intends to live …show more content…
He went from having the only person who seemed to be on his “side” to having no one simply due to the fact, as Douglass stated, “That for her to treat me as a human being was not only wrong, but dangerously so.” (25) But that only cratered more questions, like why was it that she was willing to disobey her husband before but not now? What exactly had changed? But then I remembered something that he had said before “Education, Douglass insist, goes hand in hand with freedom, and the only way to keep people enslaved is to prevent them from learning and acquiring knowledge.” (Douglass,24). It wasn’t so much that she suddenly was against him learning, it was more along of the fact that maybe he was excelling at it more then she was expecting him to. When Douglass says “I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without a remedy.” (27). I felt his pain, He had a voice, he had his own options and ideas and yet because he was a slave that all meant nothing. Douglass was aware of the world around him and yet his hands were tied, and he was pretty much forced to act oblivious to was going