ABSTRACT
In order to know where you are going, you have to know where you come from. And you have to know about the people in the past; if you look at Frederick Douglass, this is a man who taught himself to read and write. But, if you look at some of his writing, it is extraordinary that a man with no formal education could have written some of the text or some of the speeches that he wrote. And when they [adult education students] look at that, and they kind of marvel at it—“Oh here is a man who had no formal education, his mistress taught him some alphabet and from that he is able to write the kind of speeches that he wrote?”—it lets them know that here you are sitting in a GED classroom, you know, you can advance, too.
