A Disease for Dreams

The Key to Freedom - Anais Lee (Palm Valley High School, 12th Grade)

Literacy is the cornerstone of our existence. While this may seem drastic, take a look around; it’s everywhere. Literacy is a privilege that is so often overlooked, most don’t realize how often the skill is used. While some people claim that they’re “not readers,” this simply can’t be true. Reading is involved in almost every aspect of our lives without us noticing. When your alarm wakes you up in the morning, you read the options to either hit “Snooze” or “Stop.” As you hop in the car to drive to school or work, you read the street signs to know what roads to turn on. You read the menu as you pick a coffee from your local cafe. You’re reading this essay right now. These everyday items all center around reading, and we do it without even thinking.

If someone were to take away our ability to read, our eyes would open to how essential it is in our everyday lives. Frederick Douglas once said, “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free,” and while that statement is truly prevalent in the age of slavery, we don’t always realize its prevalence in today’s society. Literacy remains the secret to freedom, even today. Knowledge truly is power and without the ability to read, advancing yourself in society would be a significant challenge. Books not only give you the ability to transport to another world without even having to step out of the house, but they provide you with knowledge and insight into a wide variety of topics and simply allow you to navigate life independently. By having the ability to read, you gain the freedom to expand your horizons and make your path in life boundless. 

We read every single day of our lives. It is an essential skill that is required to navigate through our lives. Just because we no longer live in the age where newspapers and mail are our main sources of information and communication, does not mean that reading has become any less essential. Our reading has just simply been transferred to other forms of media. Even something as mindless as scrolling through TikTok requires reading as we read the funny titles on the videos. In fact, in our increasingly digital age, reading has almost become more essential.

You hear of most opportunities online from websites like LinkedIn, and texting has become one of the top forms of communication. By not having the skills of literacy, it is technically possible to get by in life, but not without extreme challenges. You will always be confined to the chains of asking someone else to do something for you or to help you get by. You can memorize your way home so you can avoid reading the street signs, but what happens when you need to get to a new location? Or what happens when you need to read the description for a new job alert?

Without the ability to read, you are confined to a box. There is only so much you can do on your own without the ability to read. You can never be free without the ability to read because you’ll never be able to be fully independent. I never realized how important reading was in so many other aspects of my life besides education until recently. After a classroom discussion on the many different aspects of our lives that reading falls into; I challenged myself to just an hour without reading to test whether it was truly that essential. I couldn’t make it ten minutes. Even as I spaced off in class, I found my eyes wandering to the whiteboard where our daily schedule was posted and accidentally read it. Despite this bump in my challenge, I tried to stay committed. But again, I made the mistake of checking my phone to where I read a missed notification. After this second bump in my challenge, I decided to call it quits. Reading truly is such an essential part of our lives and without it, we wouldn’t be able to function as normal. While reading is essential in our everyday lives, it is also a vital step in dictating our future and the path we choose to take in life. 

When you learn to read, you take the first step toward choosing your path. You aren’t confined to being a specific thing, a book is all it can take to push you in the direction of your dreams. As a child, my grandmother was a sharecropper and spent most of her days working in the fields. In the tiny shack she resided in with her multiple brothers and sisters, she never believed she could be anything more than a simple sharecropper making not even pennies down in North Carolina. It wasn’t until her grandmother, Beatrice Martin, stepped in and showed my grandmother a whole new world she didn’t know was possible. Beatrice enrolled my grandmother in school and instilled in her the importance of reading. Though her school’s library was nothing more than a coat closet, that didn’t stop my grandmother from reading every book in it. 

My grandmother’s story reminds me every day why literacy is so important. Books opened new doors and possibilities for my grandmother and allowed her to gain knowledge to eventually become an educator herself. As a child, my grandmother would have never been able to imagine moving to Japan, England, and Germany to teach, but books did that for her. Literacy allows people to choose their path in life — whether they want to become a doctor, a lawyer, or an actor, reading is the first step in any field. Throughout our history, the ability to read allowed for history to be made. From the writing of the Declaration of Independence to letters written to representatives in 2020 calling for justice to be served in cases of police brutality, literacy has proven time and time again to be the backbone of our democracy. 

Literacy develops our understanding of our language, both written and spoken, enhancing our ability to enact change within our communities and our own lives. After hearing that a library in my community faced the risk of a board that would promote censorship, I used my writing and literary skills to write an email arguing against the formation of this board. I’ve used this same skill protesting for numerous other topics I was passionate about. All of the knowledge gained from the English classes in my life came together to fight for the causes I believed in. Had I not had this ability, I would not have had the ability to fight for what I believe in. Literacy has consistently been the key to enacting change in our communities. From my grandmother pulling herself out of poverty to me writing my representatives for what I believed in, literacy has continued to be the key to freedom. 

Literacy allows us the ability to be free to form our own opinions and free to be independent. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to navigate life or advance higher in society independently. Once we take a step back and truly notice; reading is everywhere. It’s in our books, on our phones, our street signs, menus, and so much more. Our history classes taught us what literacy did for Frederick Douglass but cases like his are not unique to his time. Reading continues to inspire and change lives two hundred years later and it will continue to do so. Literacy allows people of all ages and backgrounds the freedom to choose their path, whether that’s deciding their career field or enacting change within their communities. The first step to freedom is learning to read and understand the words that lie before you. Because once you do that, “you will be forever free.”