Michael Austin's Reading The World: Ideas

Education is a tool that every human being deserves, as it gives people the knowledge and skills they require. Michael Austin wrote a collection of readings titled, Reading the World: Ideas that Matter, to inform readers on the importance of teaching and how every human needs a proper education. Reading the series of pieces, “Learning to Read” by Frederick Douglass, “O Americano Outra Vez” by Richard Feynman, “from Knowledge Its Own End” by John Henry Newman, and “Shakespeare’s Sister” by Virginia Woolf, teaches various reasons of why education is significant. Although history has shown otherwise, everyone should be given an education, regardless of race, gender, or ethnicity. Frederick Douglass is well known as one of the most famous African Americans from history. In “Learning to Read”, Douglass expresses the importance of knowledge by detailing to the reader how he was able to learn to read and write and how he overcame slavery by being literate. He writes, “I wished to learn how to write, as I might have occasion to write my own pass. I consoled myself with the hope that I should one day find a good chance. Meanwhile, I would learn to write” (Douglass 28). Douglass states that by gaining education from learning to read and write, he has improved likelihoods of escaping from slavery and attaining …show more content…
During the time period of Shakespeare, women were not given the right to an education simply because they were females. In “Shakespeare’s Sister”, Virginia Woolf writes, “But she was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil” (Woolf 50). Woolf states that although Shakespeare’s sister is just as ambitious and imaginative as he is, she is still a woman and could not be allowed to attend school or gain the knowledge that men