Essential education (#2)

Malcolm's incarceration, I believe, had a huge positive influence on his life. Chapter eleven's title, "saved" really describes what education had done for him. With all of Malcolm's free time he was able to educate himself and improve his writing skills. Malcolm's old life before he went to jail included drug selling and stealing, with minimum knowledge about life. In jail he was able to learn abundance of new vocabulary by rewriting the dictionary. "I saw that the best thing i could do was get hold of a dictionary-to study, to learn some words. I was lucky enough to reason also that i should try to improve my penmanship. it was sad. I couldn't even write in a straight line." (Haley 175). As i continued to read Malcolm X, it dawned on me that his life had changed from reading and learning. He went from a drug-selling, unarticulated person, to a well spoken person. This awaken me to the power of education. Knowledge is a powerful tool that can make your life successful in so many aspects. In life, there are so many success stories of well educated people exceeding their expectations due to their overwhelming knowledge but i did not know that knowledge could lead to a longer life. In a new york times article  "A Surprising Secret to a Long Life: Stay in School - New York Times" (www.nytimes.com/2007/01/03/health/03aging.html)i learned that education is not only for a successful life but for a longer life. " The one social factor that researchers agree is consistently linked to longer lives in every country where it has been studied is education. It it more important that race; it obliterates any effects of income" (Kolata 1) What makes this article even more interesting to me is that education plays a bigger part than race or money.