Malcolm X had a complex attitude towards education. In his early life, documented well in Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X was kicked out of his school and sent to a juvenile detention center in Michigan. On his return to school, he excelled academically; however, it became clear to him that education was not a welcoming place for Black Americans. He dropped out of school at the age of fifteen.
Spending most of his early adult life as a petty criminal, Malcolm X claimed that his first experience of education was actually in prison, where he read a huge number of books, studying concepts such as Black Nationalism. He referred to this experience as stumbling on "homemade education".
Throughout his life as a civil rights leader and activist, Malcolm X pursued education himself by reading and writing as much as he could. However, he always expressed his frustration at how he did not pursue a formal education, and was recorded saying that he was prepared to return to school and study.
To summarize, Malcolm X clearly valued the role of education greatly. He thought that through education Black Americans could understand the forces that shaped the world against them. He was an advocate of the Black community educating themselves through reading and writing, even if they did not or could not attend traditional institutions. He viewed education as the path to stop white people from "brainwashing" Black people in America.
http://infed.org/mobi/malcolm-x-on-education/
https://www.biography.com/activist/malcolm-x
Thursday, April 21, 2016
What was Malcolm X's basic attitude toward the issue of education?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
What is the theme of the chapter Lead?
Primo Levi's complex probing of the Holocaust, including his survival of Auschwitz and pre- and post-war life, is organized around indiv...
-
The statement "Development policy needs to be about poor people, not just poor countries," carries a lot of baggage. Let's dis...
-
"Mistaken Identity" is an amusing anecdote recounted by the famous author Mark Twain about an experience he once had while traveli...
-
Primo Levi's complex probing of the Holocaust, including his survival of Auschwitz and pre- and post-war life, is organized around indiv...
-
De Gouges's Declaration of the Rights of Woman was enormously influential. We can see its influences on early English feminist Mary Woll...
-
As if Hamlet were not obsessed enough with death, his uncovering of the skull of Yorick, the court jester from his youth, really sets him of...
-
In both "Volar" and "A Wall of Fire Rising," the characters are impacted by their environments, and this is indeed refle...
No comments:
Post a Comment