Reaction to "Homade Education"

I enjoyed this piece by Malcolm X. I too place high value on the idea of self-teaching and learning outside of a classroom. This is partially influenced by my prospective career field, which requires constantly learning new systems and technologies, but it also stems from my early childhood where my parents valued on stimulating and educational discussions and events. Malcolm's affinity for self-education stemmed more from his religious rebirth, and from being incarcerated for a fairly long period of time.

His story is a rather incredible one as he went from a thief on the streets to one of the main leaders of the Black Muslim and civil rights movements. Prison gave him a unique opportunity to have an excessive amount of idle time. Possessing only an eighth grade education going into prison, he was able to educate himself so well that upon his release he was able to speak and write like someone with a high college degree. This just goes to show that a formal education is not a necessity for one one to be knowledgeable and intelligent. I would argue that a college degree does not really mean as much as as our society asserts that it does. A college degree just means that you passed enough classes to earn a title and a piece of paper, but it does not measure one's intelligence level and is not necessary to be intelligent, they are not dependent on one another. People like Malcolm X have showed this in the past and people continue to show this today.

I feel that Malcolm X is often misrepresented in society today. He is often portrayed as an overly violent extremist who spurred violent racial confrontations. While there were some points that he stuck to that I disagree with (such as his early assertion that no white person could contribute to the fight for equality, which he was beginning to change his mind towards before being assassinated), he made many logical points and was always incredibly articulate in his arguments. In one of his more famous speeches, he argues that self defense is a basic, logical human instinct and that if someone is being attacked physically or mentally, as all black people of the time were in some form at the time, that their violent response is not violence at all, but self-defense. Though Martin Luther King's peaceful protest strategy was probably more effective and that Malcolm X's strategy somewhat reaffirmed, in some people's eyes, the stereotype of the "Brutal Black Buck" and the inherent violent nature of African Americans (which is of course a fallacy), it still contributed significantly to the civil rights movement and rallied African Americans together.