During the early to mid 19th century, American slavery was a national controversy that caused high political tensions across the country. In the Southern states, enslaved African Americans were almost always rejected the opportunity to learn anything about their identify or condition. According to Douglass, one of the millions of enslaved people laboring in the nineteenth century, becoming educated is the most influential step in obtaining freedom. Throughout his narrative, Douglass details his individual experiences as an enslaved person working under several different slaveowners as an adolescent. In one part of the novel, Douglass describes a pivotal moment of both the story and of his career as a laborer. After Thomas Auld, one of Douglass’ many slavemasters mentioned throughout the narrative discovered that his wife had been teaching Douglass the alphabet, he became enraged. “If you teach that n-word to read, there would be no keeping him…Learning will spoil the best n-word in the world” (Douglass, 48). Directly after these words soaked in, Douglass denotes that he had experienced a moment of realization pertaining to his condition as an enslaved person. "I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty-to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man…I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom…(I must) learn how to read” (Douglass, 48-49). Reading, in the eyes of Douglass, was not only the key ingredient to enlightenment but a powerful tool that held the potential to ultimately obstruct the slavery industry entirely. Douglass records that he was frequently discouraged from reading due to this known reality, yet he continued to enhance his education at every possibility, pursuing all opportunities he was given. “The reading of these documents enabled me to utter my thoughts…The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers” (Douglass, 54). The ignorance among the enslaved community is what kept whites as slaveowners and African Americans in bondage for centuries, yet it was the obtainment of education that would ultimately spark the Abolitionist Movement of the 1800s as well as the eventual outlaw of slavery.

In contrast to Douglass’ perspective on education, people of today’s society commonly view knowledge as an aspect of life that comes from individual liberty, and an essential component of modern-day success. “The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth” (John F Kennedy, 35th president of the United States). Starting from a young age, children worldwide often find themselves in schools, digesting information deemed necessary to comprehend in order to ensure lifelong prosperity. However, due to drastic inequalities in ethnicity, the division of classes, and a lack of financial resources, many families across the US are not able to provide adequate education to their youth, resulting only in a larger increase in the achievement divide. Based upon data collected by the National School Boards Association, a mere 7.7 million of the 50.7 million elementary and high school students across the US identity as African American and that approximately one in every two black students attends high-poverty schools. It was also found that as of 2018, the percentage of African American students who lived in households with at least one adult holding a bachelor’s degree or higher was 27% compared to 53% for white students. As indicated from these statistics, access to freedom is illustrated to occupy a major role in obtaining education in the 21st century, and the unequal distribution of education over the course of American history has and continues to further fuel the achievement divide.

Despite having been abolished more than 150 years ago, American slavery still influences division in education in the modern world. The ignorance that existed among enslaved African American communities, however, is not the only factor responsible for educational inequity. Take 20th-century segregation, for example; segregated black communities in the 1900s continue to lag behind whites in numerous sectors, including education. According to the America’s Black Holocaust Museum organization, during the Jim Crow Era, black schools in Southern US states were significantly less funded compared to white schools and offered a much less adequate learning environment. Schools were also typically overcrowded, and students commonly didn’t have ideal access to textbooks. The combination of the ignorance that stemmed from slavery as well as from segregation highly contributes to the increasingly apparent achievement gap. Based on this information and after reading Douglass’ work, access to education has clearly become influenced by history, and therefore, the connection between freedom and education highlighted by Frederick Douglass is still undoubtedly present in the 21st century. 

Cai, Jinghong. “Black Students in the Condition of Education 2020.” National School Boards Association, 23 June 2020, www.nsba.org/Perspectives/2020/black-students-condition-education#:%7E:text=In%20fall%202017%2C%20of%20the,with%208%25%20of%20white%20students. Accessed 21 Dec. 2021

Ramachandran, Sandhya. “Why We Learn.” Newcampus, 13 Dec. 2019, www.newcampus.co/blog/why-we-learn. Accessed 16 Dec. 2021

Roser, Max. “Access to Basic Education: Almost 60 Million Children in Primary School Age Are Not in School.” Our World in Data, 17 Nov. 2021, ourworldindata.org/children-not-in-school#:%7E:text=That%27s%2058.4%20million%20children.,number%20was%20much%20too%20high. Accessed 16 Dec. 2021