Homemade Education By Malcolm X Analysis

For most people, the saying, “You never know what you have, until you don’t have it anymore.” is something they hear a lot but never truly understand until they need to. For instance, English. Sometimes, as a society, we take for granted the basic fundamentals of what could propel us to success and greatness. In Homemade Education by Malcolm X, we surely see the outcome of when you aren’t knowledgeable in the English language and the great affects of when you are. Malcolm X expresses how he built himself up from inside a prison cell, by just the use of a dictionary. Similarly, we turn to Jimmy Santiago Baca, who hated to read and write as a child, but when he ends up in the county jail, he realizes just how much reading and writing would save …show more content…
Words that they don’t understand, but want to learn and; happiness they get when they imagine those words come to life. From the time Jimmy Santiago Baca was 20 he had already been in jail twice. Just like Malcolm X, he started to find comfort and contentment between the pages of books while sitting in a county jail cell. “It scared me that I had been reduced to this to find comfort”(154). Reading this part of his story, it seemed as if the feeling of comfort in a book was so foreign to Baca, that it scared him. When I opened up a book for the first time I was definitely scared of how many pages there were, but not of the feeling I got when I read. Then I came to a possible conclusion that Baca was scared because he was finding comfort in something he was never good at and never understood. The power of language and words that were in that book gave Baca a sense of comfort even though reading was something he was never good at. “I always had thought reading was a waste of time, that nothing could be gained by it”(154). This is interesting to me because as a lover of books and reading, I always saw how useful being able to pronounce and read words were. As children, we are taught that the ability to read is important and are even required to have a period of silent sustained reading. There is an implication that reading is always literary, however, there isn’t one specific subject that is tied to reading. I’ve read history books, books about animals, encyclopedias, anything to just read. Not only did it deepen my passion for books, it helped me develop my writing skills. I gained knowledge from the books that I read which evolved into writing my own stories. By having the ability to write freely, you are giving yourself a platform where you won’t be judged or graded. “I wrote my first words on the page, I felt an island rising beneath my feet like the back of a whale…more