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Education plays a vital role within this novel. It is either discussed with regard to opportunity, such as the case with Robert, Iola, and Harry, or oppositely with regard to the lack of opportunity afforded to the black race as a direct result of slavery.
Photo: 2017. Black/White & Brown: Brown Versus The Board of Education of Topeka. Comp. GPB. Web.
Atypical instances of Education:
Atypical instances of Education:
Michael Borgstrom notes “the book emphasizes this dynamic by describing the alternative literacy strategies that slaves employ to gather information typically withheld from them.
Example:
Aunt Linda is able to gauge the Union army's progress by closely reading her mistress's face: " 'I looks at her ebery mornin' wen she comes inter dis kitchen,' " she says. "'Ef her face is long an' she walks kine o' droopy den I thinks things is gwine wrong for dem. But ef she comes out yere looking mighty pleased . . . den I knows de Secesh is gittin' de bes' ob de Yankees'" (9-10)” (780). While not the traditional type of ‘literacy’ or education we typically look for or would expect, it functioned as a form of survival when no other form of literacies were available to them. This self taught literacy was a form of empowerment in itself, functioning as a type of “stealing” (that Patricia Bizzells mentions) of information and rights that shouldn’t need to be stolen in the first place, but as Harper hopes, eventually will not need to be ‘stolen in the future thanks to teachers like Iola.
The School as a setting
The School as a setting
The school becomes a setting in which race is learned and consequently where it could be challenged and empowered which is why Harper spends so much time talking about education and Iola’s role in education throughout the novel.
Literacy itself was not something slaves were allowed to have, and thus it is something that needed to be actively embedded into the culture and families of the black race.
I agree with Patricia Bizzell's observation that:
Robert’s literate abilities are ‘stolen’ literacy in several senses. His mistress in effort stole literacy for him, by teaching him to in defiance of the law that prohibited such knowledge to slaves…[But] Robert, however, has stolen this literacy away from his mistress, who, in giving it to him, anticipated controlling it (144). Through this ‘stolen’ literacy, Robert not only helps himself navigate a little further through the restrictive social structures of the time, but his literacy also aids his friends countless times, in helping them to escape slavery and join the Union ranks (Bizzells 144). This racial uplift that Robert is able to perform by means of literacy is what Harper advocates through the school system.
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