As protests continued on U.S. university campuses in late April 2024, a quote attributed to the writer James Baldwin began to circulate on social media. X user @labeautenoire_3 reshared a post about the protests, adding the quote:
The paradox of education is precisely this — that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
The post had garnered more than 68,000 views and 1,500 likes as of this writing.
The attribution is correct. The quote is part of a speech Baldwin delivered on Oct. 16, 1963, as "The Negro Child — His Self-Image." It was then published on Dec. 21, 1963, in The Saturday Review under the title "A Talk to Teachers." Baldwin argued that worthy education would lead the educated to think more deeply about, and question, the society in which they live, and they may want to change it — something that might represent a danger to the social order:
The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it — at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.
He went on to explore the effects of consciousness on the minds of Black children, and the problem with education in a country that had long sought to create social classes along racial lines.