The Best Education
Reading can help people equip with a few kinds of knowledge and mold people with different philosophical ideas and values, which is the best way to better people’s mind. So a lot of authors like to describe the experience of their education, and then narrate on their life. “Homemade Education” by Malcolm X is a great example to describe the process that reading changes author’s life, and “Learning to Read and Write” by Frederick Douglass also describes the process that the things had been taught by reading. True that these two authors lived in two different centuries and experienced different kinds of society. But one thing they have in common is that both their life was changed by reading. Thus, reading would be a very important element of human life and it is the best education of human that can change the way human thinks.
In Malcolm X’s “A Homemade Education,” Malcolm has described a process of how he teaches himself toward the success with reading. He discusses about the languages on his childhood when he grows up on the street and the language of literature, which he reads. The literature he read in prison offers him the sense of comfort and freedom. Such feeling is one that he never felt before. He was reading all the time and absorbing the entire dictionary to improve his vocabulary, as he said “I saw that the best thing I could do was get hold of a dictionary – to study, to learn some words.” That was the method how Malcolm teaches himself to read and write without any other people’s help. He profoundly believed that the vocabulary would be the key of reading. He read the famous literature any further and he began to interest in black history and slavery, and then he followed the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and led him to fighting for African American and civil rights.
In this process, Malcolm was growing up with reading being his company. He considered himself to be one of the most articulate people when he was a child. But after…