Frederick Douglass Learning To Read Analysis

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Frederick Douglas lived as a slave all for his life. However, education not only helps him to escape his life of slavery, but also helps him to recognize his goal: desire for justice, and to make substantial contributions to abolition. Obviously, this was exactly what the slaveholders tried so hard to prevent: slaves obtaining education. As a result, his desire to obtain an education illustrates how valuable education was during Douglas’ lifetime as due to slaves are banned from learning to read and write. In his essay, "Learning to Read", he describes the different teachers that helped him to become literate in the period of slavery. The very first teacher brightened him is Mrs. Auld – Master Hugh’s wife, who taught him to learn the alphabet. Nevertheless, as a consequence of being prohibited from learning to read and write, he got abandoned by his master and left alone to learn by himself. In his paragraph, he built a pathos by giving the argument: “Education, goes hand in hand with freedom, and the only way to keep people enslaved is to prevent them from learning and acquiring knowledge” (Douglass 24). This statement gives a massive sympathy for readers by illustrating both …show more content…
She was a kindly a good woman, and commenced to instruct Douglass at the time he lived in Master Hugh’s family, as he revealed: “she was a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman”. Furthermore, as pointed out by professor Droz in a recent writing class, contrast to Gloria Anzaldúa in “How to tame a wild tongue” which was very disorderly describing her essay in Spanish and English, the logos create in Douglass’ paragraph is that he expresses the logical ideas by giving evidences tied together, and examples are linear with clear order, in order that showing how he experienced to learn literacy to how the slaveholders felt when a slave as Douglass obtaining education (Personal