As an educator, I feel conflicted on the question of whether reading is a tool for liberation or oppression.

I have kids who told me they feel like reading is a "white person" thing and don't like to read because of it. I have taught lessons to those same kids, informing them of the long-term history behind literacy laws in the South and their use for suppressing minorities from voting. I have taught extensively about laws in the South before slavery ended that made it explicitly illegal to teach a slave to read.

"Why were slaveowners so scared of a slave learning to read?" I asked.

"Because then you would be smart enough to win your freedom," one of my kids responded.

However, I do feel conflicted that reading is a tool for power, liberation, and expression. At some level, I feel like reading is more of a tool for oppression in modern-day society, especially because upper class and more wealthy families in America have access to more prestigious schools. In lower-income and high poverty communities, students have less access to books and materials needed to read.

With these basic inequities in society and our education system, perhaps it's better to say that an emphasis on reading promotes inequality rather than it promotes oppression. I have stressed to my students that you need reading for basic tasks, including becoming a better communicator, being able to know who and what you're voting for, knowing how to fill out a job application or knowing what you're in for when you sign a contract.

Reading is a foundational skill that we all need. But in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, reading might not actually rank that high. It would fall into the field of "self-actualization," which is the very top of the hierarchy compared to needs like food, water, sleep, and safety.

How is reading important when you're hungry and trying to support a family, barely able to have food on your plate? How is reading important when you don't have an adequate place to sleep at night? How is reading important when you have a broken family and problems at home that make it difficult and nearly impossible to concentrate in school?

I struggle with these questions as a teacher but also as a citizen. I do not believe that a person's education is indicative of his or her status or worth. Education should never be a good status symbol because of the privilege often associated with it, since a college education is deprived from about 2/3 of our American population.

Elitism comes when we associate education status with intelligence. I can personally attest to a lot of very, very intelligent kids that don't necessarily get good grades, and have met very smart and savvy people who didn't graduate from high school. More often leading to a lack of literacy and bad grades is a lack of opportunity rather than a lack of aptitude, which is precisely why my teaching program uses the term of opportunity gap rather than achievement gap because an opportunity gap refers to the ways in which the unequal or inequitable distribution of resources and opportunities affect what a student is expected to learn or perform.

But I will go back to a lesson for today, where I taught a reading by Patty Johnson of Teaching Tolerance about a black slave boy named John who played with the white enslaver's son named Michael. The two played together and one time, Michael bought a book and taught Michael how to read. While Michael wanted to make sure his actions were just a secret, one time, Michael's mother caught them and told Michael that "I told you not to teach them to read".

While John didn't understand the importance of why he wasn't supposed to learn to read, his mother told him this:

The enslavers were afraid that if we knew how to read, we could learn as much as white people. Then, we could do just as much. We could be powerful enough to fight against slavery and even stop it one day.

Learning to read, in this instance, was a tool for liberation. Across the globe, activists have been making efforts to teach more women to read, as 493 million around the world currently can't read. The UN has found that literate women are more likely to send their children to school, have better maternal health, and can economically improve their communities.

Part of why it is so important to read is because reading helps children learn to read. Part of why Seeds of Literacy is working so hard to teach women to read around the world is because the NIH has found that the biggest indicator of a child's future academic success is a mother's reading skill, outweighing factors like neighborhood and family income.

When Frederick Douglass once called knowledge "the pathway from slavery to freedom". When Douglass first tried to learn to read, he became unhappy and frustrated with having a hard time reading. He started to wonder whether reading was more a curse than a blessing, but he eventually realized that reading "called into existence an entirely new train of thought" and made him "unfit to be a slave".

The right to literacy and a good education is distributed unequally across the world, and in our country. Those inequities frustrate me every single day as an educator in an under-resourced and underserved part of our country in Baltimore City -- but the only thing more oppressing that educational inequalities is not giving education at all, and not being taught to read at all.

Reading, then, whenever and wherever we do it, is a tool to think for ourselves, to attain liberation and free ourselves from oppression.