As the years go by, literacy is one of those ideals in the United States of America that has been forced upon children so much that they despise and complain about it, saying that it forces them to go to school day in and day out to no avail. The youth do not yet realize that everyone has been taught to read since it is impossible to forget, kids are taught this so that they cannot be used like those who have been debased by slavery or dictators in order to control a certain group of people. Literacy is used across the world so that people can learn, so that people can know when they need to fight back, and so that people can rebel. How could literacy possibly be a double-edged sword?

“As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.” –Albert Manguel
As Albert Manguel stated in his quote above, tyrants know that an illiterate crowd is the easiest to control; everyone knows that literacy is power, but with great power, comes great responsibility. There are galling yet true reasons the Khmer Rouge lasted as long as they did in Cambodia with the heinous and depraving deeds they had since the beginning of their horrible plan, the Khmer Rouge knew that literacy was power and illiteracy created ignorance, an ignorant crowd is much easier to control then a powerful one. Therefore people who wore glasses, spoke a different language, or even received education from Western territories were murdered in the killing fields immediately since the Khmer Rouge took a conjecture that these people would be smart enough to start an insurrection against them. Like Frederick Douglass explained, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” So all of these educated people were forced to close their mouths and hide their intellect in order to survive, their power was being pushed down to the most horrible, brutal, and defiling extent, so those who did not have that intellect were the lucky ones, they did not have to hide, their ignorance set them free.

“Reading is important, because if you can read, you can learn anything about everything and everything about anything.” -Tomie DePoala.
With literacy there is no real limit upon what can be learned given that most of the knowledge within the world revolves around the ink inside of a book. To the illiterate, there is only a certain extent by which any man or woman can learn given that they cannot read about what is happening around the globe but instead know only about the problems that they face. For those repressed with illiteracy, an A is merely three sticks attached to each other while the literate person sees these three sticks as a form of communication and knowledge in the world. To the illiterate, their knowledge is held up in a small glass bottle of ignorance with a closed cap on top while literacy is the hammer by which the glass can be broken and their knowledge can be brought out and released on to the world.

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” -Thomas Jefferson

Even today, the media curses the literate as every newspaper speaks of the horrors occurring in the world whether the people like it or not. Every day, people hear stories of death, murder, disease, and hatred across the world whether it be a petty robbery or a national outrage, the media curses the literate with the stories of the bad rather than the good. The news tells the literate that the world is bleak and everything and everybody cannot be trusted. The illiterate do not have to suffer from this incessant hopelessness, the illiterate are in their own little world, filled only their own problems and the problems of those close to them rather than the literate whom have to face the problems of everyone in the world including themselves. The world for the ignorant is an easy life to live while they are sheltered from the atrocities of global awareness, while the life of the intelligent is occupied with horrors, which no man or woman wishes to witness, but they must day after day.
“Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope.”-Kofi Annan
Generally, throughout all of history, literacy is and has been a double-edged sword whether it be through the Khmer Rouge or slavery, literacy has a “good” and “bad” side to it. Literacy comes with the ideals of knowledge, while it creates a certain sense of hopelessness to all it impacts, given that the literate know all the detrimentally tragic horrors of the world. On the other hand, illiteracy provides ignorance to all it impacts as they only know the world around them selves, which provides a clear-minded type of happiness which very few literate people could possibly achieve. Overall, literacy is the equivalent of power with knowledge, while illiteracy is the equivalent of power with happiness.