Gloria Anzaldua The Power Of Education

Education is often perceived as a path to a successful career, but according to journalist, Chris Hedges, the true purpose of education is to “create minds, not careers.” Although today, the importance of education and its purpose is not valued as high as it should be. So does the ability to critique and challenge truly come from education and literacy? I would argue that this is true based on the writings from Chris Hedges, Gloria Anzaldua and Theresa Perry. How education is able to “create minds” has shown up many times in the lives of those of the past. Although today, according to Hedges (2009), “We are a culture that has been denied, or has passively given up, the linguistic and intellectual tools to cope with complexity, to separate

But she also speaks to her feelings towards writing and the power it has. Anzaldua (1980) explains that “Writing is dangerous because we are afraid of what the writing reveals: the fears, the angers, the strengths of a woman under a triple or quadruple oppression. Yet in that very act lies our survival because a woman who writes has power. And a woman with power is feared.” (p. 171). Here, Anzaldua explains how she has experienced writing to be a way of survival for women because of the power writing gives. Another story that also reveals the power from reading and writing was the experience of Frederick Douglass. In Theresa Perry’s Young, Gifted, and Black (2003), she mentions the effect reading had on Douglass when she writes, “As Mr. Auld had predicted, the more he read, the more restless, discontent, and unhappy he became” (p. 16). Perry uses this experience to explain how through learning to read, Frederick Douglass was able to see the actual situation he was in and to then desire a better future for himself, freedom. These experiences that authors, Gloria Anzaldua and Theresa Perry share provide strong examples of the power that education truly

Gloria Anzaldua describes how writing was what she needed in order to “survive”, since writing was what gave her power as a woman. Writing is something that comes with an education, and through the life of Gloria Anzaldua she was able to prove that through writing she had gained power and the ability to speak to the truth of the oppression she had endured as a woman. The experience of Frederick Douglass, as Theresa Perry has told it, allowed him to desire freedom as a slave. Without having learned how to read, Douglass would not have been able to understand how he was being treated as a slave, which connects back to how Chris Hedges believes that the lack of literacy is what prevents us from seeing the truth. If the stories hold to be true, then it is decidedly so that the power to create minds is what education has to