Jimmy Santiago Baca's Homemade Education

The Impact of Education

As Malcolm X once stated, “reading of books…I had never been so truly free in my life” (Goshgarian 144). Malcolm X grew up in the foster system, dropped out of school at the tender age of fifteen, and grew up to be one of the prominent leaders of the civil rights movement. Helen Keller lost her ability to see and hear at nineteen months, became the first deaf, blind person to graduate from college, and became a prominent leader for not only disabled rights but the for the women’s suffrage movement, birth control, and female equality. Jimmy Santiago Baca was a runaway at the age of thirteen, sentenced to five years in maximum security prison, and became a world-famous poet. ___ Phung had lagged behind other students,

X was a hard working self-educated man that taught himself how to read, write, and speak better just as Phung had been able educated herself over the summer. In a community, school, or family that does not fully comprehend the important value education plays on the person’s future can compromise the person’s whole future. Malcolm X grew up as the fourth child of eight children. As a child of a preacher who was an avid activist for African American rights, X saw firsthand how racism played a key role in his life. (Biography.com Editors, Malcolm X Biography, Biography.com) As described in the excerpt Homemade Education, X describes his life as a someone who is always active about what he feels strongly about. That when X wrote letters to friends when he was in jail, he never got a reply not because his friends wouldn’t but because his friends could barely read the letter sent to him. Admittedly, he stated he was one of the most well-spoken individuals of the streets, yet when he tried to get what he wanted to say out on paper he could not express the words he wanted to portray properly. X stated, that he had grown frustrated over how he could not correctly articulate what he was trying to convey through the letters in which he wrote. An objective was made when he started his self-journey to his homemade education, not through school but by writing the

Baca is a world renowned poet speaks up about education, jail, and the community in which he lives in an excerpt of his autobiography called Coming into Languages. He talks about the many hardships he had faced because he was ridiculed by teachers because he did not know the material. As an Apache descendant in rural Chicago, he did not get the education he needed because he was already seen as uneducated by his teachers. His teacher assumed that he wasn’t to be given the time because they assumed he was disinterested, stupid, and would never try in school. Teachers automatically stereotyped Baca and made his feel guilty for not knowing the work on the chalkboard. In Baca’s autobiography excerpt Coming into Languages, he explains these incidences perfectly “From the time I was seven years old, teachers had been punishing me for not knowing my lessons by making me stick my nose in a circle chalked on the blackboard” (Goshgarian, 152). Which he explains that the teachers punished him for not understanding the work and continues by saying, “Ashamed of not understanding and fearful of not asking questions, I dropped out of school in the ninth grade.” (Goshgarian, 152) He didn’t have the right foundation because as a child instead of being taught things he didn’t