Education
When it came time to enter high school, Lady Bird moved away from home to live with another family during weekdays in the town of Jefferson, Texas, since there was no high school in the Karnack area (her brothers had attended boarding schools in New York). Eventually she graduated third in her class at the age of 15 from Marshall Senior High School in nearby Marshall. Despite her young age, she drove herself to school in her own car, a distance of 15 miles (24 km) each way, because, she said, "it was an awful chore for my daddy to delegate some person from his business to take me in and out." During her senior year, when she realized that she had the highest grades in her class, she "purposely allowed her grades to slip" so that she would not have to give the valedictorian or salutatorian speech.
After graduating from high school in May 1928, Lady Bird entered the University of Alabama for the summer session, where she took her first journalism course, but being homesick for Texas, she did not return for the fall term at Alabama. Instead she and a high school friend enrolled at St. Mary's Episcopal College for Women, a strict Episcopal boarding junior college for women in Dallas, where she "converted to the Episcopal faith," although she waited five years to be confirmed.
After graduating from St. Mary's in May 1930, Lady Bird toyed with the idea of going back to Alabama, but another friend from Marshall was going to the University of Texas, so she chartered a plane to go down to Austin to check it out. Prophetically, as the plane landed, she was awed by the sight of a field covered with bluebonnets and instantly fell in love with the city. Lady Bird received a Bachelor's of Arts degree with honors in 1933 and a second bachelor's degree in journalism Cum Laude in 1934 — a time when women were hard pressed to have a career of their own, let alone a college education. She was active on campus in different organizations such as Orange Jackets and believed in student leadership. Her goal was to become a reporter, but she also earned a teaching certificate. The summer after her second graduation, she and a girlfriend traveled to New York City and Washington, D.C., where they peered through the fence at the White House.
Read more about this topic: Lady Bird Johnson
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“I say that male and female are cast in the same mold; except for education and habits, the difference is not great.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“I think the most important education that we have is the education which now I am glad to say is being accepted as the proper one, and one which ought to be widely diffused, that industrial, vocational education which puts young men and women in a position from which they can by their own efforts work themselves to independence.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“The legislator should direct his attention above all to the education of youth; for the neglect of education does harm to the constitution. The citizen should be molded to suit the form of government under which he lives. For each government has a peculiar character which originally formed and which continues to preserve it. The character of democracy creates democracy, and the character of oligarchy creates oligarchy.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)