Douglass reveals that a single-minded focus on education as a vocational enterprise risks obscuring other important aims—including personal development, ethical maturation, and preparation for civic life. Producing students who are able to succeed in the workforce is a worthy goal, but vocational skills need to be enriched by a more holistic, humanistic perspective. Since their early formalization in the ancient world, the liberal arts have helped develop this perspective. Again, the liberal arts and vocational skills are not diametrically opposed—the kind of critical thinking encouraged by the former can be useful in any profession, for instance. But the liberal arts offer more than indirect economic benefits. They can, for example, nurture the thoughtfulness important in a free society.

In an 1853 letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe that exemplified his interest in vocational education, Douglass didn’t call for the creation of new colleges to serve African Americans. Instead, he sought schools that would teach "agriculture and the mechanic arts." Douglass argued that teaching vocational skills—especially industrial ones—to African Americans would help them climb the ladder from slave to integrated freeman. A prosperous, upwardly mobile African-American working class would, he thought, offer a profound refutation of many pro-slavery arguments, which held that African Americans were incapable of economic self-sufficiency.

Douglass’s interest in practical training is in harmony with the thinking behind contemporary efforts to expand economic opportunity—especially to students from disadvantaged backgrounds—by promoting vocational programs and targeted enterprises such as Project Lead the Way. But his memoirs demonstrate that practical training is hardly enough. In his 1845 autobiography, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, he chronicles his efforts to fashion an identity as a free man, offering a bracing portrait not only of the physical hardships of slavery but also of its psychological torments. "You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man," Douglass wrote.

Crucial to these efforts was gaining knowledge. While the American slavery system depended on physical force, it also relied on a web of mental and spiritual coercion. In his quest to become a free man, Douglass had not only to break his physical bonds; he also had to pare back that web strand by strand in order to claim knowledge about himself and the world. Like many others born a slave, Douglass did not know for certain his birth date or the identity of his father, and the mystery of his origins pained him. As he wrote, "The white children could tell their ages. I could not tell why I ought to be deprived of the same privilege." Early in his life, then, Douglass saw that enforced ignorance was a key tool of slavery. For example, one of Douglass’s owners became enraged when he found out his wife was teaching him how to read, declaring, according to Douglass, that a slave "should know nothing but to obey his master—to do as he is told to do." Reading would "forever unfit him to be a slave" because it would make him "unmanageable."