Slavery as a human institution has been around since the beginning of history. We are most familiar with its face in our national record. Slaves were property. Men learned to look upon their brothers as nothing but something they owned and used as property. Eventually some in American society came to accept the idea that you could do about anything you wanted to with your "property." You could lock it in chains and fetters, you could set it free. You could beat and starve, you could feed and pamper. You could maim and cripple - or worse. And you were free to do so. It was your property. But there was one thing you could not do. You would be punished severely if you were caught doing one thing with your property. You could not teach it to read. You could not expose your property to the knowledge that there are choices placed before us; that even though our bodies may be bound, our minds and hearts are free to be anything we want to be. We are free to strive for dignity. We are free to fight to free ourselves from the restraints which keep us enslaved. That knowledge is dangerous to those who would bind us under any type of slavery. Joseph Smith said, "A man is saved no faster than he gets knowledge, for if he does not get knowledge, he will be brought into captivity by some evil power." When Satan sought to take away our agency – he planned to enslave us so we could not learn and know, and in so doing we could not choose who we would be. He would have all the glory and we would be his slaves. We would not be allowed to read.
Lucifer lost the war in heaven and was cast out. Now that he had been thwarted in his efforts to prevent us from gaining knowledge he would tempt us so we would make ourselves spiritually blind and willfully ignorant. Joseph Smith taught, "evil spirits...have more knowledge, and consequently more power than many men who are on the earth." Yes, men would be able to choose their course. But as long as evil had the upper hand in knowledge, it would also hold the power. Joseph Smith continued, "Hence (men) need revelation to assist us, and give us knowledge of the things of God." Men could only be righteous if they were lawful, and to be lawful they must have knowledge of the Law. Knowledge truly is power.
The thirst for knowledge is part of our nature. I have seen my children when they begin to really want to know something. Sometimes the not knowing drives us crazy. When the serpent told Eve in the garden that the fruit would make her wise, she looked upon it, and the scripture says that it became pleasant in her eyes. She wanted it more and more. It was knowledge. She wanted to know. And she partook. Paradise may have been lost, but attainable exaltation loomed ahead. The children of Eve were given the power to gain sufficient knowledge and deliberately choose freedom and eternal life for themselves. Eve did not thwart God's plan, she put it into motion.
When God drove the couple from Eden, He did not drive them away from Himself. He set them on the course that would save them. He drove them out in an eastward direction. In the scriptures, east "is the direction that represented God. Something that came from the east was representative of the idea that it was of God, sent by God, or godly in nature. If something moved eastward, it is symbolically moving 'toward God.'... Therefore the Fall was not a tragedy wherein all was lost and thrown into chaos...On the contrary, the expulsion from Eden began the mortal journey along the only path that would prepare them for eternal glory; it was a movement toward God in the truest sense" (Alonzo Gaskill, The Lost Language of Symbolism, p 151-152). 
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