Karen Chandler
Associate Professor, Department of English
“As a scholar specializing in African American literature, I am continually reminded that education has not always been a right and that its benefits have been difficult, even impossible, for many to achieve. Although the literacy skills that Frederick Douglass fought to master may seem a far stretch from a college-level course in Milton or advanced calculus, his account of his defiant embrace of learning Douglass suggests otherwise. Douglass connected his growing proficiency in reading and writing with a growth in consciousness, a broadening and sharpening of his mind, and an uplifting of his soul.”
I see a liberal arts education as an important means of developing into a thoughtful, responsible member of a diverse, complex society. While it is certainly not the only process that supports this development, it is the one I know best. The liberal arts, which comprise the humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences, are more than a great pool of facts and artifacts. They also inspire and promote various ways of engaging with our world and our history. They keep us growing and help us to live fully.
As a scholar specializing in African American literature, I am continually reminded that education has not always been a right and that its benefits have been difficult, even impossible, for many to achieve. Some of the literary works that I teach and write about are slave narratives, one of the foundations of African American literature. In many of these narratives, enslaved children, women, and men are denied the right to education. They are taught to stay in their places to serve others’ needs (though quite a few find ways to circumvent these limitations).
Perhaps Frederick Douglass’s story is one of the best-known examples of this phenomenon, in which white slave holders refused to allow black slaves to learn to read and write, because these skills allowed access to powers that would disrupt or destroy the existing social order of white mastery and black subordination. Although the literacy skills that Douglass fought to master may seem a far stretch from a college-level course in Milton or advanced calculus or astrophysics, in his account of his defiant embrace of learning Douglass suggests otherwise. Literacy skills are the foundation of higher education. Douglass connected his growing proficiency in reading and writing with a growth in consciousness, a broadening and sharpening of his mind.
Douglass’s deep and continual engagement with learning and with the liberal arts occurred outside of school. I find Douglass a powerful example not only because as a young man he resisted a status quo that denied him the right to self-actualization and self-empowerment but also because he was a lifelong advocate of education. Late in his life, he championed vocational education that prepared African Americans for viable jobs in an expanding economy.
Yet Douglass also championed liberal arts education, associating it with intellectual freedom and enhanced ways of life. In an 1894 speech he asserted that such an education “means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul . . . into the glorious light of truth, the light only by which men [and women] can be free.”
I admire Douglass and many other advocates of education who see the need for educational preparation that acknowledges our complexity as human beings. A liberal arts education meets this need: it exceeds the requirements of any particular job or career and enriches our lives as thinkers, questioners, doers, members of families and communities, and citizens of our nation and the world.
