Jean Jacques Rousseau said that plants are shaped by cultivation and men by education. We are born weak, we need strength. We are born totally without, we need help. We are born stupid, we need judgment. Everything we don't have at birth and need when we grow up is given to us by education. Rousseau's educational philosophy was one understood by blacks early in the country's history; education meant freedom and one could give one's life in an attempt to achieve learning. 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 expanding slavery and that some whites thought Africans should be free. However, 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, pamphlets, newspapers, anything else they could find. Some master families, especially wives and daughters, educated many slave children at night in dimly lit rooms, reading to them by firelight. Some masters established small churches on their plantations or farms and taught slaves to read the Bible. The children of freed slaves escaped to secret church schools, putting their lives at grave risk. They did this to get an education that would allow them to get a job. Blacks began establishing their own schools because they were not entirely welcome in white schools, even in the North. They eventually founded their flagship, a high school that would prepare black children for higher education. The first high school for black American students opened its doors in 1870, when Congress defeated...... middle of paper .... ... kept black Americans in a state of oppression. However, education was seen as the way forward. Today a black man is president of the United States and there are black politicians elected to Congress and the Senate. Several Fortune 500 companies are led by blacks. Admission to any college or university is open to black high school scholars. But now, getting good grades and an education are passé, 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, was thrown back into a tar pit of welfare and government dependence. The M Street/Dunbar High School model cannot be duplicated 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.