Parallel Paths: My Educational Journey and Great Thinkers

If the story of my education were to be added on to the stories of all of the great leaders included in How Lincoln Learned to Read, it would be strikingly similar to the stories of the great thinkers themselves. Like Abraham Lincoln, I loved to read and like Sojourner Truth, I learned my behaviors by watching my family. The story of my education parallels with these and many others of those included in the novel. Themes such as self-education through reading, household observation, and passions for various tasks run through my story as well as the stories of many of the great thinkers mentioned in the book. When I was just under two years old, my parents walked into my room to find me propped up on the floor reading Goodnight Moon. They were amazed, as they should have been; children don’t usually begin to read before they go to school. A few weeks later, they walked in on the same occurrence except something was off; I was holding the book upside down. What they realized was that I was not actually reading; I had memorized every word on every

In this way, I find similarity between my story and that of Sojourner Truth. Wolff writes that Sojourner Truth “learned, by following her mother around, the basics of how to keep house (Wolff, 2009, p. 72). For Sojourner, this was the very beginning of her education. The methods through which she learned from her mother, most importantly observation, molded her learning style for the rest of her life. Similar to how Sojourner was taught household chores by her mother, I was taught the same skills by my older brothers. I learned through watching and actual training just as she did. In the same way that chores became the basis of her education, they became the basis of mine. I learned how to watch attentively. Even though these chores were not part of my formal education, they taught me something extremely valuable: how to