What did MLK say about the purpose of education?

Education was a subject close to my heart, and I spoke about it in several connected ways. In my commencement address at Lincoln University, which became known as The American Dream, I argued that democracy itself depends on an educated citizenry prepared to claim their full inheritance. The American dream, I said there, is a dream of a land where men of all races, nationalities, and creeds can live together as brothers — and education is one of the chief instruments by which that dream is either realized or betrayed. In Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, I was direct about what education has historically promised and what it was now being asked to deliver. As I wrote there, “The schools have been the historic routes of social mobility” Yet when Black Americans and the poor asked that the schools perform this same function for them, resistance appeared from every quarter — and this at the very moment when education had become more than ever the passport to decent economic life. I also pressed the matter in personal terms. Doors were opening that had long been closed, and I believed the great challenge was to be ready to enter them. That meant striving not merely to be a good Negro teacher or doctor, but to do one's work so well that “nobody could do it better” For me, education was never merely personal advancement. It was the preparation of citizens for democratic life — and denying it to any group was an act of deliberate injustice, not mere neglect.