LAURENTIUS DE VOLTOLINA ■ Liber Ethicorum des Henricus de Alemania
MAKING CONNECTIONS
How might Rabindranath Tagore (p. 40) interpret Voltolina's illustration? How might the teacher and students of Tagore's classroom be arranged in such an illustration?
Compare the authority of the teacher in this drawing to the authority of Liberty in Liberty Leading the People (p. 494). From what source do the main figures seem to derive their authority?
WRITING ABOUT THE TEXT
Write an essay describing your own educational experiences as they relate to the drawing by Laurentius de Voltolina. Have you ever taken classes like the one depicted in the painting? What, in your experience, makes for an engaging classroom? a disengaging one?
Analyze the painting closely and explain why some students seem engaged while others do not. Is this the result of the way the information is being presented? If so, what about the presentation seems to work so well for the students in the front row?
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Locate a photograph of a college or university lecture online and compare the students, teacher, and pedagogical strategies in that photo with those in the drawing.
frederick douglass
Learning to Read
[1845]
FREDERICK DOUGLASS (1817-1895) was the most famous and respected African American in the United States for much of the nineteenth century. In 1845, he published his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which tells of his birth as the son of an enslaved woman and an unknown white man, his early life as a slave in Maryland, and his escape to freedom in 1837. The book became an international bestseller and catapulted him into a prominent position that he maintained for the rest of his life. He became a leader of the abolitionist movement and tirelessly spoke and wrote about the evils of slavery.
The turning point in Douglass's early life, as he presents it in his autobiography, was when he learned to read and write. His master's wife, Mrs. Auld, first taught him the alphabet—illegally, since slaves were forbidden to read or write. However, under pressure from her husband, she soon abandoned the effort, and he was left to learn on his own. His one guide in this effort was the children's schoolbook The Columbian Orator, a collection of great speeches, poems, soliloquies, and occasional pieces used to teach rhetoric and public speaking. In The Columbian Orator, Douglass learned a perplexing truth: the same country that had enslaved him had fought a revolution in the name of freedom. For the rest of his life, he drew on this tradition to call attention to the hypocrisy of slavery in a nation founded on principles of, in his words, "justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence."
In the example that follows, Douglass describes the strategies that he used to learn to read and write. The passage is important not only because it records Douglass's determination and perseverance but also because it reveals his keen understanding of the link between education and a desire for justice. For a time, Douglass relates, he felt oppressed by the fact that he had become more educated than most other slaves and wished that he could be as ignorant as they. In time, however, his education helped him to escape slavery and to make substantial contributions to its abolition.
Douglass is keenly aware of his story's great irony: that the white masters who tried to prevent slaves from being educated on the grounds that it would make them unfit for slavery were absolutely correct. Education, Douglass insists, goes hand in hand with freedom, and the only way to keep people enslaved is to prevent them from learning and acquiring knowledge. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is both an account of and a testimony to the emancipatory power of education.
Douglass relies heavily on emotional appeals as he narrates his early experiences with reading and literacy. These experiences were both positive and negative, and his emotional reflections are both joyful and disconcerting. They all, though, have the effect of pulling the reader in and creating sympathy for Douglass.
I lived in Master Hugh's family about seven years. During this time, I succeeded in learning to read and write. In accomplishing this, I was compelled to resort to various stratagems. I had no regular teacher. My mistress, who had kindly commenced to instruct me, had, in compliance with the advice and direction of her husband, not only ceased to instruct, but had set her face against my being instructed by anyone else. It is due, however, to my mistress to say of her, that she did not adopt this course of treatment immediately. She at first lacked the depravity indispensable to shutting me up in mental darkness. It was at least necessary for her to have some training in the exercise of irresponsible power, to make her equal to the task of treating me as though I were a brute.
My mistress was, as I have said, a kind and tender-hearted woman; and in the simplicity of her soul she commenced, when I first went to live with her, to treat me as she supposed one human being ought to treat another. In entering upon the duties of a slaveholder, she did not seem to perceive that I sustained to her the relation of a mere chattel, and that for her to treat me as a human being was not only wrong, but dangerously so. Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me. When I went there, she was a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman. There was no sorrow or suffering for which she had not a tear. She had bread for the hungry, clothes for the naked, and comfort for every mourner that came within her reach. Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these heavenly qualities. Under its influence, the tender heart became stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one of tiger-like fierceness. The first step in her downward course was in her ceasing to instruct me. She now commenced to practise her husband's precepts. She finally became even more violent in her opposition than her husband himself. She was not satisfied with simply doing as well as he had commanded; she seemed anxious to do better. Nothing seemed to make her more angry than to see me with a newspaper. She seemed to think that here lay the danger. I have had her rush at me with a face made all up of fury, and snatch from me a newspaper, in a manner that fully revealed her apprehension. She was an apt woman; and a little experience soon demonstrated, to her satisfaction, that education and slavery were incompatible with each other.
From this time I was most narrowly watched. If I was in a separate room any considerable length of time, I was sure to be suspected of having a book, and was at once called to give an account of myself. All this, however, was too late. The first step had been taken. Mistress, in teaching me the alphabet, had given me the inch, and no precaution could prevent me from taking the ell.[14]
current proverb "give him an inch and he will take a mile."
The plan which I adopted, and the one by which I was most successful, was that of making friends of all the little white boys whom I met in the street. As many of these as I could, I converted into teachers. With their kindly aid, obtained at different times and in different places. I finally succeeded in learning to read. When I was sent of errands, I always took my book with me, and by doing one part of my errand quickly, I found time to get a lesson before my return. I used also to carry bread with me, enough of which was always in the house, and to which I was always welcome; for I was much better off in this regard than many of the poor white children in our neighborhood. This bread I used to bestow upon the hungry little urchins, who, in return, would give me that more valuable bread of knowledge. I am strongly tempted to give the names of two or three of those little boys, as a testimonial of the gratitude and affection I bear them; but prudence forbids;—not that it would injure me, but it might embarrass them; for it is almost an unpardonable offence to teach slaves to read in this Christian country. It is enough to say of the dear little fellows, that they lived on Philpot Street, very near Durgin and Bailey's ship-yard. I used to talk this matter of slavery over with them. I would sometimes say to them, I wished I could be as free as they would be when they got to be men. "You will be free as soon as you are twenty-one, but I am a slave for life! Have not I as good a right to be free as you have?" These words used to trouble them; they would express for me the liveliest sympathy, and console me with the hope that something would occur by which I might be free.