Liberty consists of the capacity to make meaningful choices; those ignorant of their choices cannot possibly make them. Ignorance itself is a kind of tyranny which chains people.
Harder to be taken advantage of if you know the means by which one takes advantage of another.
Knowing the wealthy need you more than you need them lets you make stronger demands and form unions.
Being knowledgeable gives you job security and independence, you have intrinsic value as a capable resource - and if spurned can become a troublesome enemy because you understand your opponent and can take advantage accordingly
Knowledge is absolutely power, and power gives you opportunity for freedom to choose how to live your life.
Not strictly: he says only an educated people can be a free one, meaning that all free peoples are educated ones, but the inversion of that is "No uneducated people can be free". By that, I assume he means that uneducated people are far more susceptible to deception and manipulation compared to the educated that will be better able to detect lies, point them out and understand explanations of why that's bullshit.
As an example: If I tell you that the "vaccines cause autism" study was a) just a pilot study, not an actual one at scale, b) heavily fudged to the point that one scientist was kicked off the project for refusing to falsify results, c) only examined a specific vaccine, the MMR combination vaccine usually given to infants and d) led by a guy that had financial stakes in a company trying to sell individual vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella, you can probably smell the bullshit.
If I tried to explain that to someone who's not educated enough, they'll probably stare at me blankly, then shrug and say something to the effect of "Well, you never know what to believe these days" and change absolutely nothing about their stance.
Things get far worse when someone tells their base that some group is capturing and eating their pets and ends up inciting violence by people who take him at face value.
Edit: I don't know why I said "harmless" there. Anti-Vaxxers aren't harmless, even when compared to incitement of hate crimes.
If I tried to explain that to someone who’s not educated enough, they’ll probably stare at me blankly, then shrug and say something to the effect of “Well, you never know what to believe these days” and change absolutely nothing about their stance.
Wow, I never knew I had conservative-related PTSD, but here I am having vivid and terrifying flashbacks to just that scenario.
one way is, that if you do not know the impact of policies, you cant make informed decisions about them and thereby lose control over your life and environment.