Frederick Douglass ponders his master's educational philosophy:



"Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world"



Adapted from pages 56 - 57 of The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein, 2008.

"Young Americans have everything to gain from reading, more civic and historical knowledge, familiarity with current events and government actions, a larger vocabulary, better writing skills, eloquence, inexpensive recreation, and contact with great thoughts and expressions of the past.

"And yet even in the intellectual havens of our universities, too many of them shield themselves from the very activity that best draws them out of the high school mindset.

"Compare their attitude with that of young Frederick Douglass, a slave in Baltimore whose mistress started to teach him the ABCs until her husband found out and forbade it.

"Years later, Douglass remembered his master's words as brutal truth: Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world, he overhears him say."

Then the slave owner continues:

"Now if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him.

"It would forever unfit him to be a slave."

The author then goes on to make a telling point:

"Douglass listened closely and realized well the liberating power of written words (and why Southern states made teaching slaves to read illegal).

"[He]e pledged in his autobiography, Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read."


Some good points to ponder! :)