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The Autobiographies Of Doctor Isaac Asimov And Malcom X

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Everyone has received some sort of education in their lives and with whatever knowledge you’ve received, do you consider yourself educated? First of all, you need to know that being educated means knowing that you yourself are ignorant. Likely, education is supposed to show how there is always something more that could be learned and to aid in learning it. Just as Will Durant said, “Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.’’ Through the autobiographies of Doctor Isaac Asimov and Malcom X, as well as a passage by Alfie Kohn, you will begin to understand what education really means.

Beginning with the autobiography “What is Intelligence,” Doctor Isaac Asimov writes about how he learned how ignorant he was after meeting a mechanic who he first described as someone who was only half as intelligent as he was. The doctor opens up by talking about an aptitude test he took when he was in the army, scoring a …show more content…

When Malcom was writing a letter to Mr. Elijah Muhammad, he realized that he couldn't express what he wanted to say and was annoyed because he thought of himself as the most articulate person from where he lived. Although he felt this way, it wasn't until getting put in Charleston Prison that he began to try and change that feeling. At Charleston Prison, he met a person named Bimbi. Bimbi was a very wise man was Malcoms motivation to learn because he was jealous of the amount of knowledge Bimbi had. For this reason, he decided to ask for a dictionary and a table to try and learn words. When he spent two days looking through the words, he realized that there was a vast amount of words that he didn't know. During this time he was educating himself by writing letters and by going through the dictionary which allowed him to realize that there was so much that he didn't

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Malcom X gives his history on his own literacy in Literacy Behind Bars. He reveals that he did not go any farther academically than the 8th grade. The impression people retain of his literacy and his intelligence extending into advance schooling is largely imparted to his days spent in prison. Malcom would spend every waking hour absorbing everything that he could. He went through the dictionary, copying and memorizing every page from a to z.

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He taught himself to read by first writing the pages of the dictionary and rereading what he wrote, memorizing these word by reading “back, to myself everything I’d written on the table over and over, aloud” (X, 2004, 246). Then once he completed the dictionary he went on to read books. Reading more advanced books as time went on. Although a different way of reading this way was proven to be very successful for Malcom, he describes the first time he read a book after completing the dictionary as a “new world that opened” (X, 2004,

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Finally, he decided faking was not the answer to bettering himself, so he found a dictionary. Excited, Malcolm wrote that he “spent two days just riffling uncertainly through the dictionary’s pages. I’d never realized so many words existed!” (274) Malcolm creates a visual,

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