Education vs. Ignorance Theme Analysis

Carlos Bulosan’s book is about pursuing a better life, first in the Philippines and then in America. He finds that education is the key to escaping the deprivations of want and ignorance. Education promises a reprieve from manual labor via less physically demanding jobs, but it also allows Carlos to develop an awareness of how systematic injustice relies on ignorance to keep Filipinos and other minorities in a state of perpetual servitude. Carlos is born into the peasantry, an existence defined by a lack of education. He witnesses his illiterate parents struggle to obtain the basic necessities of life, and he sees the sacrifices they make so that his brother, Macario, can get an education and obtain a better job to support the family. Carlos’s early experience as a peasant teaches him that educated people have the opportunity to break free from the clutches of want and ignorance, and that poverty and enforced ignorance often go hand-in-hand. 

Bulosan wastes no time emphasizing the importance of education for those who want to escape a life of poverty, especially following the U.S. occupation of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. U.S. rule brings public education to a former Spanish colony where education “belonged exclusively to the rulers” and the peasants “were denied even the most elementary schooling.” Carlos understands how education bestows power on those fortunate enough to have it, while those without education live in poverty and ignorance. Most Filipinos so appreciate “free education”—and the attendant opportunities it provides—that “every family who had a son pooled its resources and sent him to school.” Carlos’s family is no exception. “It was for Macario that we were all working so hard,” he writes. They want Macario to get a job and “help us support our large family.” Carlos and his illiterate parents are well aware that the path out of poverty lies through school.  Macario’s pursuance of this path inspires Carlos. “He who had so little education knew how necessary it was to go into the world with a good education,” Bulosan writes. His family struggles, but Macario gets a high-paying teaching job, a clear demonstration of how schooling can improve the peasantry’s material conditions.

Despite his hope to go to school, structural barriers—namely racism and the poverty from which he tried to escape in the Philippines—impede Carlos’s ability to get an education in America. When he arrives in Seattle, racial discrimination and poverty combine to thrust Carlos into a migrant laborer’s existence. He shuffles from state to state, working in canneries, fruit orchards, vegetable fields, and gambling halls. He has neither the time nor the money for schooling. Hard labor for little pay overtakes Carlos’s life. “It was a planless life, hopeless, and without direction. I was merely living from day to day,” he writes. This life makes him unable to plan for a future with schooling. America is in the Heart is about hope for a future defined not by poverty and ignorance, but by studying and advancement. This is the darkest part of the story because that future appears utterly unobtainable. Nonetheless, Carlos embodies the American archetype of the “self-made man” through his own journey of self-education. He realizes his potential through his “revelation” that he is able to understand English, which inspires him to pursue writing as a means of self-empowerment. Carlos dreams of becoming a writer in order to make life better for himself and for other people. He learns about inspirational writers and vows to “educate myself to be like them!” Carlos realizes that if a peasant from the Philippines can become a writer without formal schooling, he can also do more to help others born into similar positions.

The book’s final two sections involve Carlos’s pursuit of self-education in two ways: by reading as much literature as he can and by working in the labor movement. These twin pursuits eventually help him fulfill his dream of becoming a writer. When he spends two years in the hospital recovering from tuberculosis, Carlos reads voraciously. Alice and Eileen Odell, Carlos’s close friends, provide him with books, and they study as if Carlos were in a formal school. “I wanted to educate myself as fast as possible,” Carlos writes. He likens the potential release from ignorance as the ultimate human freedom: education is a life-saving process, the difference between a life of suffering and a life of flourishing. Inspired by the “democratic writers and poets” who brought about action to address political and economic injustice, Carlos discovers that literacy literally offers him the chance to make the world a better place. However, he worries that his education will inspire more wrath from ignorant people. “I acquired a mask of pretense […] at ignorance and illiteracy,” he writes, “I felt that if they knew that I had intellectual depth they would reject my presence.” Bulosan reiterates a point that threads throughout the book: America is a land of opportunity and danger, the latter often being a result of the former.

Carlos therefore decides to take his talents to the Filipino working classes via the labor movement. The movement’s goal of “the unification of the minorities” to create a “national program of peace and democracy” inspires Carlos. He uses his education to write for labor publications and to teach less-educated Filipinos about the power that unions hold to better their lives. Carlos’s self-education frees him from a peasant’s life, and allows him to find a place in the labor movement. There, he learns how to turn big ideas into practical solutions to help others escape from want and ignorance. Bulosan’s journey to escape the mental and material deprivations of a peasant’s life therefore underscores the central role that education plays in eradicating poverty and eroding the conditions that actually create it. Not only does education offer the potential to secure better-paying jobs, it also shows minority groups how powerful people use education to rule over and perpetuate the ignorance of less-powerful minorities.