Education as Liberation and Justice

Sor Juana's entire life was shaped by her hunger for education and her recognition that access to learning was fundamentally unequal. She famously taught herself through whatever texts she could access, and later argued passionately for women's right to education. For her, education was not about individual advancement alone but about enabling people to understand, question, and transform their circumstances. She connected ignorance to injustice: systems that keep people uneducated maintain their capacity for exploitation and control. Every civilization that moved toward fairness did so by expanding educational access, recognizing that knowledge enables people to recognize injustice and advocate for themselves. Education, in this framework, is transformative—it changes not just what people know but their capacity to claim rights, participate in democratic discourse, and imagine alternatives to oppressive systems. Sor Juana's own example demonstrates that denying education is itself a form of injustice, and that fairness requires actively creating pathways to learning for all, especially those whom society systematically excludes.