Jean Jacques Rousseau said that plants are shaped by culture and men by education. We are born weak, we need strength. We are born totally helpless, we need help. We are born stupid, we need judgment. Everything that we do not have when we are born and that we need when we grow up is given to us through education. Rousseau's philosophy of education was one that black people understood from the earliest days of the country's history; education meant freedom and everyone sacrificed their lives in an attempt to acquire knowledge. Slaves in colonial America who were not allowed to learn to read and write. White slave owners did not want their slaves to know that people were arguing about the expansion of slavery and that some whites thought Africans should be free. Yet slaves read and wrote secretly under lamps at night or in the woods or other secluded areas during the day. They read everything they can get their hands on; books, brochures, newspapers, whatever they could find. The families of some masters, especially wives and daughters, educated many slave children at night in dimly lit rooms, reading to them by firelight. Some masters founded small churches on their plantations or farms and taught slaves to read the Bible. The children of freed slaves infiltrated secret schools located in churches, risking their lives. They did it to get an education that would allow them to find a job. Blacks began establishing their own schools because they were not entirely welcome in white schools, even in the North. Eventually, they created their crown jewel, a high school that would prepare black children for higher education. The first high school for black American students opened in 1870, when Congress defeated...... middle of paper... ..ry kept black Americans in a state of oppression. Yet education was seen as the way to progress. Today, a black man is president of the United States and black politicians are elected to Congress and the Senate. Several Fortune 500 companies are led by black people. Admission to any college or university is open to black high school students. But now, getting good grades and an education is outdated, interpreted as “acting white.” It is as if black education rose from the ash heap of slavery and Jim Crow after the Civil War and then fell back into a pit of welfare and government dependence. The M Street/Dunbar High School pattern cannot be reproduced. in today's educational and cultural environment, but an educational model based on its policies and academic standards can be replicated to produce superior black students..