Bethune’s education – The daily blog of behavioral and cognitive economics

Mary McLeod Bethune reminds us: education must be fought for

I came across Mary McLeod Bethune one night while putting my son to bed – or nilikuwa namlaza mwanangu. That’s Swahili, my mother tongue. I write exactly the way I talk, so the two languages sometimes just naturally tend to tangle together. Anyway, I was scrolling my phone in the dark. If you look her up, the history hits you immediately. She was the 15th child in her family, but the very first one to actually be born into freedom. She’s the woman who took a dollar and 50 cents, gathered five young girls, and somehow built what is now Bethune-Cookman University out of thin air. She spent her entire life fighting a country that was dead set on keeping Black children out of classrooms. ….[READ]