Importance Of How I Learned To Read And Write By Frederick Douglass

Education is extremely important in life because there were slaves like Frederick Douglas who fought for us to have an opportunity to learn. In everyday life today we have kids that don't take education serious at all. Slaves like Frederick Douglas were beaten and punished just for trying to learn their A, B, C 's, yet we have a lot a people who just drop out of school. People act as if education is not a privilege In ‘ How I Learned To Read And Write “ by Frederick Douglass , he tells his story of how he learns how to read and write as a slave. Many people don't understand the importance of books. Growing up, books were not a big importance in my life, they were only used as a punishment. As I got older I grew to understand the importance for …show more content…
It's been proven that how things affect you while you're young can influence how you see things as you grow into an adult. At the beginning of Douglas’s essay, he describes his experiences with reading at a young age. The master's wife taught Douglass his a, b c’s but when the master found out, he made his wife stop teaching him. “ If you teach that nigger ( speaking to myself ) how to read, there would be no keeping him”,( Douglass pg 270). Douglass was a slave, and slaves were not allowed to learn how to read because the master believed that slaves would overpower them if they were educated. Yet, that did not stop Douglass he began to trick the White kids in the streets to teach him how to read. “This bread I used to bestow upon the hungry little urchins, who, in return, would give me that more valuable bread of knowledge. Douglass 272”. Reading was more than just an enjoyment for Douglass, the knowledge it would bring would help him free himself and others from slavery. On the other hand, reading wasn't an enjoyment to me at all.Growing up my mom never had a big enjoyment of book or reading, unless it