How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
An answer came to Katie. It was so simple that a flash of astonishment that felt like pain shot through her head. Education! That was it! It was education that made the difference! Education would pull them out of the grime and the dirt […] Ah! That’s what Mary Rommely, her mother, had been telling her all those years. Only her mother did not have the one clear word: education!” (27.36)
This is Katie’s epiphany—that education is the way out of poverty. From this moment forth, Mama is even more adamant that the kids get through high school.
Quote #8
“…Maybe when she gets education, she will be ashamed of me—the way I talk.” (27.38)
Mama knows that education will lift them out of poverty, but will it also pull her children always from her? Just like how sometimes people with more education are outcast from their peers, does it also make them outcasts in their own families? It's a real testament to how much Mama loves her children that she recognizes education might pull them away from her, but she wants it for them anyway.
Quote #9
“With that money, our troubles would be over,” thought Francie. “We could pay rent on a three-bedroom flat somewhere, Mama wouldn’t have to go out to work and Laurie wouldn’t be left alone so much […]
“But I want to go back to school!” She recalled the constant harping on education in the family.
Granma: It will raise you up on the face of the earth.
Evy: Each of my three children will get three diplomas.
Sissy: And when Mother goes—pray God not for a long time yet—and baby is big enough to start kindergarten, I’m going out to work again. And I’ll bank my pay and when Little Sissy grows up, I’ll put her in the best college there is.
Mama: And I don’t want my children to have the same hardworking life I have. Education will fix it so that their lives are easier (44.79-85).
Francie’s promotion and raise temporarily make her question whether she should go back to school or not. But it is only for a split second, because she knows that school is the only way to make a good life for herself in the long run.