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 prefer to finish my education at a different school.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Those who first introduced compulsory education into American life knew exactly why children should go to school and learn to read: to save their souls.... Consistent with this goal, the first book written and printed for children in America was titled Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes in either England, drawn from the Breasts of both Testaments for their Souls’ Nourishment.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)