Malcolm X Alternative Education According

Malcolm X

Alternative Education According to Malcolm X and Richard Rodriguez

Many of the great minds and figures in history, while renowned for their extraordinary knowledge, singular abilities and expansive influence, may not have come by their education traditionally. Moreover, it may in fact be the case that some of the distinctions driving their unique success are due in part to having taking an unusual path to a place of intellectual enlightenment. Indeed, the contrast between traditional education and such unusual paths is on display in excerpts from Richard Rodriguez and Malcolm X in their "The Achievement of Desire" (1982) and "Learning to Read" (1965) respectively, Rodriquez and Malcolm X describe sharply divergent educational paths to their respective successes but ones which mutually decry the institutionalism of traditional education.

Quite ironically, it was another kind of institutionalism that helped Malcolm X achieve his intellectual evolution. According to the excerpt drawn from his autobiography, Malcolm X was empowered by his literacy, a capacity which he gained through his own painstaking self-education methods while serving a sentence at the Norfolk State Prison. After teaching himself both penmanship and vocabulary by transcribing the entire dictionary in his own tablet, Malcolm was addicted to reading and the knowledge it afforded him. He contrasts the intrinsic value of poring over knowledge for its own sake to the status implications of traditional schooling. Malcolm X recalled "as you can imagine, especially in a prison where there was heavy emphasis on rehabilitation, an inmate was smiled upon if he demonstrated an unusually intense interest in books. There was a sizable number of well-read inmates, especially the popular debaters, Some were said by many to be practically walking encyclopedias. They were almost celebrities. No university would ask any student to devour literature as I did when this new world opened to me, of being able to read and understand." (Malcolm X, p. 1)

That he segues here into a discussion on how education has so often been used to spread a mythological history casting white men as heroic underscores the latent hostility toward the traditional education he was never afforded. By contrast, Rodriguez is afforded this education and yet, for many of the same reasons, is moved to decry it. Rodriguez tells by sharp contrast to Malcolm X of a life given over to opportunities, accomplishments, familial support and cultural pressure in the context of education. Rodriguez tells that "although I was a very good student, I was also a very bad student. I was a 'scholarship boy,' a certain kind of scholarship boy. Always successful, I was always unconfident. Exhilarated by my progress. Sad. I became the prized student -- anxious and eager to learn. Too eager, too anxious -- an imitative and unoriginal pupil." (Rodriguez, p. 598)