In the opening of her book Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, Danielle Allen describes her experience as a professor at the University of Chicago teaching the same texts—great books from Plato to Toni Morrison—to two quite different groups of students: by day, some of the nation’s most elite undergraduate students, and by night, adult students struggling to balance work and education.1 Despite marked disparities in academic preparation and economic and social class, the result was the same in both groups. “Through reading [the words of the Declaration] slowly we came into our inheritance: an understanding of freedom and equality and the value of finding the right words.”2 Indeed, Allen, a classicist and political scientist, makes a case for liberal education as indispensable to equality. She writes, “The achievement of political equality requires, among other things, the empowerment of human beings as language-using creatures.”3
The argument put forth by Allen, who has spoken and written eloquently on issues of race and education, is intriguing because it turns on its head the standard egalitarian objection to liberal education: that it is elitist and aristocratic. The familiar response is often defensive and negative, arguing that liberal education need not be elitist. Allen, by contrast, makes a compelling case for a certain kind of liberal education making a direct contribution to equality. She focuses on the role of liberal education in supplying a vocabulary adequate to one’s experience and to the capacity of each individual to make a case for a vision of what constitutes a just life together. Her argument calls to mind Frederick Douglass’s great statement about the connection between education and equality in his Narrative of a Life.
In that book, Douglass describes being moved, as a slave, from Maryland’s Eastern Shore to Baltimore, where he lives with a family. The wife, whom Douglass depicts as initially exhibiting toward him the “kindest heart and finest feelings,” begins teaching him how to read. The lessons are cut short by the husband, who insists that a slave “should know nothing but to obey his master—to do as he is told to do. Learning… would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable…. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.”4 Douglass discovers, in the reasoning behind the prohibition, a liberating insight, a “special revelation” as he terms it, concerning the “white man’s power to enslave the black man.” The reason for the cancellation of his lessons reveals to him the incompatibility of “education and slavery.”5 Slavery is so contrary to nature that
to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.6