Guy Montag stood to the side of the burning house, watching thick, black smoke billow out from the windows and cracks of the house. He caught a glimpse of a stack of books burning and taking the knowledge contained within up in the flames. Guy did not know why he was commanded to burn the “forbidden” books, just that he mustn’t question those who told him to do so. Guy waited patiently until the fire burned down, and then proceeded to board his truck and leave the scene. He looked out his rear-view mirror at the remains of the blackened house, somewhere within there lie that stack of books, now nothing more than ashes.
For centuries, literacy has separated the educated and elite from the unenlightened and poor. Literacy, the ability to read, has been the defining characteristic of who is in power in society. Guy Montag’s ignorance towards literature and illiteracy kept him suppressed by the watchful authorities of Fahrenheit 451. It was not until Guy discovered books that he was able to see past his prison. Guy’s education by reading broke him free of his chains and truly
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Education can be defined as the act of receiving human knowledge from another source for one’s personal personal use and means of growth. Human knowledge can be shared in many ways with others, but reading is the only true way to indefinitely capture human language. Prior to the development of written languages, ancient peoples shared knowledge by manually teaching the next generation. This was by no means a precise process, with variations in the knowledge occurring and the exact preciseness of the original knowledge being lost. Reading resolved these fundamental problems and made the transference of human knowledge a clean, not messy endeavour. Reading is thus central to education, because it is the only means by which all of man’s knowledge can be passed down truly