This writing from Kant completely coincides with the core topic of this class. Immanuel Kant writes in “What is Enlightenment?”: “Have courage to make use of your own understanding! is thus the motto if enlightenment. ” Kant is pushing us to step out of our comfort zone and search for for new ideas and to stop relying on the orders of others.

In our class, we are essentially publicly challenging and making use of our reason by creating new theories in the way people should be taught. In the first reading we had in the class, Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar, the author tells us a story of how a teacher reproached him for telling her students that there are different ways of obtaining an education, rather than going to school. If we were to view this situation from the point of view of Immanuel Kant, Kant would say that what the teacher is doing is preventing the next generation from thinking for themselves, essentially telling them you have no other alternative. This is the type of thinking is what we are trying to combat in the theme of this course. To be enlightened doesn’t necessarily mean going through traditional schooling. Let us take Frederick Douglass as an example; Here we see a man, prevented from having a formal education, however, through his desire to learn, he was able to become a great and influential man and writer of the 19th century.