W.E.B. Du Bois

[George Sheridan <learn@jps.net>]

"Of all the Civil Rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 
5,000 years, the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental. The 
freedom to learn ... has been bought by bitter sacrifice. And whatever we 
might think of the curtailment of other civil rights, we should fight to 
the last ditch to keep open the right to learn, the right to have examined 
in our schools not only what we believe, but what we do not believe; not 
only what our leaders say, but what the leaders of other groups and 
nations, and the leaders of other centuries have said. We must insist upon 
this to give our children the fairness of a start which will equip them 
with such an array of facts and such an attitude toward truth that they can 
have a real chance to judge what the world is and what its greater minds 
have thought it might be."

W.E.B. Du Bois in P.S. Foner (ed), W.E.B. Du Bois Speaks, pp. 230-231, New 
York: Pathfinder, 1970


George Sheridan