African
...Christian home; for a few years only my mother was a Christian at the time; my dad eventually got saved. My life had undergone, what at the time seemed to me to be drastic changes when he was converted. My dad made my siblings and me dispose of all of our toys. We were banned from television, with the exception of the news, Christian broadcasts, and occasionally the educational programs. I was devastated. I did not know what had come over my dad. What made things even worse was that my mother couldn’t help us. He believed that we were too occupied with secular things and needed to be concerned with our souls. This was the beginning of a period of intense study of the bible for our household; my dad also became a preacher during this time. My education, and the education of anyone, goes beyond the walls of the schoolhouse. I believe that if I was only given what the books had to offer, I would only know half of what I know and would not know how to keep in context what the books had to offer. Most of my informal education came out of my home and from other family members. One thing in particular that comes to mind is the local news media. I once accepted everything as the truth and assumed that the media was unbiased. Listening to their conversations and observing their behaviors helped me determine when a newscaster would be giving the news with a slant, and that slant most of the time would be along race lines. Now I can’t watch the news without listening or watching for some type of “slant”; there could very well be no slant at times, but I’ll find one. My parents are always stressing the importance of educatio...