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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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If education is not teaching you how to use the knowledge, the diploma would be the most useless stuff in the world. While, the common sense of people still tend to believe education means smart, vice versa. “You got college degree, you, you must be smart!” that’s many people may say to a college graduate several decades ago. However, are the graduates really as smart as people believe?

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Furthermore, Malcolm x was sent to jail where he was motivated to begin his homemade education by struggling to communicate with Elijah Muhammad and envying Bambi for his competence to assume control of the conversation and his stock of knowledge. For that reason, Malcolm learned to read by copying dictionary, beginning to read and comprehend books, exploring black history, especially slavery and studying world or global history.

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The Gain from Being Locked Away In prison the author Malcom X teaches himself how to read and comprehend written word in the essay “Literacy Behind Bars”. It started in Charlestown Prison where Malcom felt envious of another inmate named Bimbi for his reading abilities. Malcom didn’t get past middle school, therefore, he couldn’t read well enough to comprehend the text in a book. This lead Malcom to start studying a dictionary “to study, to learn some words.”

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In a Homemade Education Malcom talks about his time in prison, in which he learned how to read. “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. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke in me some long dormant craving

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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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It all began when he was sentenced to a term at Charlestown Prison. He met a man named Bimbi who was fader more educated than young Malcolm had ever been, which eventually led him to his determination in his prison studies and gain knowledge. He began first by looking at available books, reading only the words he could and skipping the ones he couldn’t because his lack of reading skills which he soon found to be complete a waste of time. It wasn’t until he got to the Norfolk Prison Colony that he finally realized what he really needed was to use a

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Since Malcolm X was envious of Bimbi’s knowledge, he tried to imitate him by reading, but his limited amount of knowledge prevented him from fully grasping the what he read. He stated that, if it weren’t for his desire to learn, he would have given up on reading. His lack of knowledge and penmanship led him to buy a dictionary as well as some tablets and pencils so that he can improve his handwriting. Not knowing which words he needed to know, Malcolm X copied down each page and repetitively read his own handwriting out loud until he eventually wrote down every word in the dictionary. After studying every word, he was finally able to fully grasp what he was reading and read every chance he got.

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He thought that the best thing he could do to improve his comprehension would be to study and learn words from a dictionary. He spent two days reading a dictionary and became overwhelmed by all of the words that he did not know even existed. He began copying all of the words onto his tablets, one page every day, and he would read them aloud to himself. Eventually, he was able to remember almost all of the words he had studied. Ever since his “word-base broadened,” he was able to pick up a book and understand what he was reading (3).

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Learning to read by Malcolm X is an autobiographical piece describing his self-education. Malcom describes being “Increasingly frustrated. At not being able to express what I(He) wanted to convey in letters.” This gave him the drive to learn to read and write during his time in Charlestown Prison, and Norfolk Prison. He started his self-education by reading books, piecing together the bits that he could understand using context to complete sentences he could not comprehend.

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581 Words | 3 Pages

In addition, he was jealous of Bimbi, who always over controlled the conversations. Therefore, Malcolm X put all of his effort into learning new words and their meaning in each section of the dictionary. By writing down the words on the tablet and read them back to himself after days, his vocabulary was broadened. As a result, he could read, understand what a book said, write his own words, and have interested in reading.

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