How Did Malcolm X View Education?

¶ … Malcolm X's ideas about education in America and its function in society. Malcolm X was self-educated, and he gained that education while he was serving time for robbery in prison. He believes this education helped turn his life around and give him the opportunity to change his life and create a passion for black rights and individual rights. Education changed Malcolm X as a person, and he believes that anyone can change his or her life through education.

This essay illustrates that education does not have to come from an institution of higher learning, as long as it is serious and taken seriously. It also shows how a good education can make a real difference in a person's life. Malcolm X learned to really read and comprehend what he was reading, while he was in prison and it changed the course of his life. He says, "I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me.

I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life" (Malcolm X 217). It changed the course of his life because he began to read history, and he began to realize how unfairly most history books treated blacks and other minorities. Malcolm X's essay is a discourse on education in America, and how it lets many young people down. He left school at the eighth grade, and could not read or write well at all.

He says, "I was lucky enough to reason also that I should try to improve my penmanship. It was sad. I couldn't even write in a straight line (Malcolm X 211). This shows the sad state of education in the country, especially in poor communities, and how little opportunity many of these young people have to improve themselves when they get out into the "real" world.

Malcolm X got along as a hustler and a thief, which is about the only thing his lack of education prepared him for in the adult world. Malcolm X sees the primary function of education in society as one that primarily serves the white residents of the nation, while essentially ignoring the blacks, and he set out to illustrate this and change it.

He writes, "My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America" (Malcolm X 217). He does not believe that should be the primary function of education, but that is what he discovers as he continues to read. The function of education should be to educate every child fully, and use correct historical texts in the process, but that is not how education functions, as Malcolm X discovers.

He conveys his message graphically, especially when he describes his readings in history -- regarding slavery and its horrors. Probably the strongest statement he makes about the white view of black history is also one of the best of his statements about the past. He writes, "Because who in the world's history ever has played a worse "skin game" than the white man?" (Malcolm X 217). His writing is lucid and compelling, and he argues well.

It is difficult to argue with him about his points, because he backs them up with facts, even though it is an emotionally charged argument, too. He is a strong writer, (another gift he got in prison), and he uses strong language to prove his points. He states, "Not even Elijah Muhammad could have been more eloquent than those books were in providing indisputable proof that the collective white man had acted like a devil in virtually every contact he had with the world's collective non-white man" (Malcolm X 216).

His growing understanding of the plight of minorities around the world is what drove him to take up Islam when he got out of prison, and to begin to preach his feelings and his ideas about his religion and the plight of blacks in this country. In that, learning to read and gaining an education really did change his life forever. Malcolm X uses a very specific writing strategy while constructing this essay.

It follows a specific time line, and grows more "intelligent" from beginning to end, following his own growing education in prison. In the beginning of the essay, he writes, "Let me tell you something: from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading on my bunk. You couldn't have gotten me out of books with a wedge" (Malcolm X 211).

That is a simple but very strong statement, which shows the beginnings of a love affair with books and learning. That just grows (or explodes) as the essay continues, showing his own growth and transformation from reading and writing. One of Malcolm X's main arguments is that.