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In “Freedom for Literacy and Literacy for Freedom,” Theresa Perry reads the African American philosophy of education straight out of the slave narratives: Frederick Douglass learning his letters in defiance of an enslaver who warned that reading would unfit him to be a slave. Perry’s point is that for Black people in this country, literacy was never a neutral skill. It was always tied to freedom, to citizenship, to leadership, and the reason for reading was the engine of the reading. Take away the why, Perry teaches, and you get compliance with the mechanics of school without the identity that makes a child claim school as theirs.