Education Quote by George Jackson

That first sentence lands like a jailbreak in slow motion: not triumph, not prophecy, but a hard-won discovery. Jackson isn’t romanticizing “resistance” as a vibe; he’s treating it as an acquired skill, something people are trained out of until pressure, example, and necessity teach it back into them. “They have learned” matters. It implies a prior condition of enforced ignorance, a system designed to make opposition feel futile or even unthinkable.

Jackson’s subtext is pedagogical and collective. Resistance isn’t framed as the work of a lone hero but as a contagious competence spreading through a population. The line reads like a field report from inside an apparatus of control: the real breakthrough isn’t ideology, it’s the psychological shift from isolation to shared possibility. That’s why the second sentence is so tactile. “Holds” suggests grips, restraints, chokeholds - power as something physical, intimate, and violent, not abstract policy. And “beginning to slip away” is deliberately incremental. He doesn’t claim the hand has been pried off. He signals an early stage where the oppressor’s certainty is wobbling.

Context sharpens the stakes: Jackson wrote from within the prison system, a place engineered to make resistance costly, invisible, and atomized. In that setting, the claim that resistance is “actually possible” is less inspiration than contraband truth. The genius of the phrasing is its restraint: it makes hope credible by making it provisional. The slip is small; the consequence, potentially enormous.