The Printing Press- Education is Power

I think that the printing press was a key factor in today's daily life. Before the printing press, much of the population around the world was illiterate. This made taking money from the people and giving it to the church and the king, extremely easy. People thought that by paying the Pope and the church they would be accepted into heaven because they couldn’t read the Bible, or get their hands on a Bible to check if they were supposed to be giving money to the Pope or not. Now, the printing press changed all of that. Now only about 12% of the whole worldwide population is illiterate, which is a great jump.

I think that the printing press was a great thing for humankind because it helped people all over the world obtain an education, which is a basic human right. I think that education is a human right because education is power, whenever there was a dictatorship in history the first thing the dictator did was take away the people’s books and schools and they usually killed all the professors. Because if you can control the past (what people think happened in the past), then you can control the present (what people learn now), which in turn helps you control the future (what people do with their education).

I think that the people in the medieval times are a good example of this because they couldn’t read so they didn’t know that when the Pope told them that to get into heaven they needed to pay, he was lying to benefit himself and the King. But when Gutenberg created the printing press it changed the system and the way people thought because the Bible was now in their language and cheaper than before. This caused the people to realize that the Pope and king had been tricking them and it created the formation of new branches of Christianity. This shows that as soon as the Pope and King lost control of the education of the people, they lost power.