A Moment with Dr. Moore

Reaching the North Star: Frederick Douglass and Education

Frederick Douglass revered teachers, as he said in 1894 while making a speech on the blessings of liberty and education. “To properly teach is to induce man’s potential and latent greatness, to discover and develop the noblest, highest, and best that is in him,” as the famed statesman and social reformer explained at the opening of the Manassas Industrial School for Colored Youth near the first battle ground of the Civil War in Virginia. “Teachers pursue one of the highest callings” since “human existence depends on instruction,” Douglass declared to a group of the school’s first students. “Education means emancipation. It means life and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of men into the glorious light of truth, the light by which men can only be made free.”

I couldn’t agree more, so I’ve devoted much of my career to raising the status of teachers, especially our early childhood teachers who play such a key role by giving young learners a good start in life. “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men,” as Douglass pointed out in 1855. And modern research has increasingly shown Douglass was right. Children who receive high-quality early learning tend to have better outcomes in school and life. So, Douglass defied the odds as a former slave who was mostly self-taught at a time when it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write. “Some men know the value of an education by having it. I know its value by not having it,” Douglass said. His efforts to gain an education led him to speak out for ideals that still guide the early childhood field as it strives to provide high-quality learning for all young children.

Douglass showed the value of peer collaboration and support, after learning the first few letters of the alphabet from the mistress of the plantation where he lived. When her husband objected, Douglass turned to the young white boys he met in the street while running errands. “As many of these as I could, I converted into teachers. With their kind aid, obtained at different times and in different places, I finally succeeded in learning to read,” Douglass wrote in a bestselling memoir from 1845. In it, Douglass also recalled how he would “say to them that I wished I could be as free as they would be when they got to be men,” and “they would console me with the hope that something would occur by which I might be free.”

In the meanwhile, Douglass continued to study in secret at night. After seeing petitions to end slavery in newspapers of the 1830s, he wanted to pass on the gospel of freedom to his fellow slaves. So, he established a Sunday school where he taught many slaves to read. His students understood that “there must be as little display about it as possible,” Douglass recalled, since “to meet for the purpose of improving the mind and heart was esteemed a most dangerous nuisance.” And Douglass would go on to show the results. Like Morpheus in The Matrix, a film I’ve always loved, Douglass knew that rebellion ensues when you liberate the mind. “Free your mind,” Morpheus said, as he urged Neo to realize that machines enslaved the human race and that he was the one who would lead the way to freedom for all people.

“Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave,” Douglass knew long before Neo defied the machines, so he began to consider “the pathway from slavery to freedom.” Still, “there is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path,” as Morpheus pointed out, and Douglass found that to be true. He made two failed attempts to escape before 1838 when he managed to board a north-bound train from Baltimore and made his way to New York City. Douglass would later portray his flight from slavery by saying, “I stole this head, these limbs, this body from my master and ran off with them,” words that mocked the notion that one human being could be the property of another. His self-emancipation also stirs me as a Black man since it shows the power of Black people to determine their own fate.

Douglass went on to become the most important leader for civil rights for Black Americans in the 1800s. He gained renown for his speeches and anti-slavery writings, including three autobiographies describing his experiences as a slave. He also published a newspaper called The North Star, a title that paid homage to the fact that escaping slaves used the North Star in the night sky to guide them to freedom. In the years before the Civil War, The North Star became a prominent voice for both the abolition of slavery and the growing women’s movement as shown by the paper’s masthead when the first issue appeared in 1848: “Right is of no sex—Truth is of no color,” as the masthead declared boldly, and “All we are brethren.” Douglass would develop this ideal in speeches and writings on education, which express goals that my staff and I still pursue at the Council.

The point of education, as the Council maintains, is not just to impart academic skills, but also to pass on values and respect for others. This was also Douglass’s view of education, as he looked to the future. He envisioned an education that would produce intelligent, moral citizens who could strengthen “the proud fabric of freedom.” An education like this should overcome prejudice and disprove stereotypes, so Douglass favored integrated schools, as he implored in The North Star. “Let the colored children be educated and grow up side by side with white children, come up friends in an unsophisticated and generous childhood together, and it will require a powerful agent to convert them into enemies, and lead them to prey upon each other’s liberties and rights.” His words conveyed one of the Council’s core values since we believe in “treating each other with dignity, valuing diverse perspectives, and fostering an inclusive environment” in the classroom, the workplace and the society beyond.

Still, these ideals couldn’t take root unless Black people could contribute to society, as Douglass pointed out. “The most telling, the most killing refutation of slavery, is the presentation of an industrious, enterprising, thrifty and intelligent free Black population.” So, after Emancipation in 1863, he initially favored an education that would prepare the freed slaves for jobs, much like our career and technical education programs today. “No greater benefit can be bestowed upon a long-benighted people,” Douglass maintained, “than giving to them the means of a useful education.” That was the goal of the Manassas Industrial School, as Douglass pointed out at the opening of the school. Job readiness is also the goal of the CDA® program, which has helped many women of color gain the competence and skills for rewarding careers in the early learning field.

They play a key role in giving young children the blessings of liberty and education. That’s especially crucial for children from marginalized communities in which generations have failed to break the chains that stop them from fulfilling their promise. We still need social change decades after Douglass called for “a new order” in the wake of Emancipation. He knew “the work does not end with the abolition of slavery but only begins.” Now, this work continues at the Council, where we’re still striving to raise the status of teachers and build pathways for them to achieve professional growth.

The Council isn’t trying to do this alone, and, like Douglass, we believe in collaboration. “I would unite with anybody to do right,” he said, and the Council has acted on his words by working with a wide range of partners. State governments, early learning organizations and child advocacy groups nationwide share our belief that we must do right by children by giving early childhood teachers more support and higher pay. For example, partners like the National Association for the Education of Young Children, Bipartisan Policy Center and DC Office of the State Superintendent of Education joined us at a recent Early Educators Leadership Conference in showing the link between what teachers do and outcomes for young children. Our partners know that a strong early childhood workforce plays a vital role in building social justice by helping all young learners be their best.

Teachers pursue one of the highest callings, as Douglass knew long ago, and earning a CDA helps educators gain more of the recognition they deserve. By spreading the reach of the CDA, the Council is walking the path to reach its own North Star: a society where all children learn and thrive in settings led by competent, valued early childhood teachers. I believe each one of our teachers is a leader who deserves our blessings since they help children gain the crucial skill that let Douglass determine his fate. Literacy is still a key to liberty in our modern world because it opens the door to opportunity and success. “Once you learn to read,” as Douglass maintained, “you will be forever free.”