Today in class, we had an interesting discussion about Wright’s narrative and the ways in which he has changed so far over the course of the book. One point in particular that I found interesting was Hallela’s comment about how Wright’s education also took place outside of the classroom, in the form of learning how to interact with his peers. Wright realized that on the first day of school, he often had to get in a fight in order to prove his worth and strength to the other boys. Also, Chloe noted that Wright also learned more about his position in society as a black man, and how he was supposed to be natural enemies of the white boys.
Overall, as we realized in class today, this idea of “education” can take on several different forms. Not only did Wright prize his education in the classroom of learning how to read and write, but he also placed great worth in his social education. Each of these different forms of education helped him to navigate his way through society. In our own lives, we can all probably relate to Wright’s experience with education. Each day, we learn new things, whether that be academic or social. We are constantly learning how to approach different situations or interact with different people in addition to our work in the classroom. Is there any type of education that is more important than the others? For Wright, he seemed to value both fairly equally. He took great pride in his success academically, and noted that he planned to take advantage of his academic success to pursue a career in the future. He also talks about how important it was for him to figure out his place in society, especially in the broader racial context of the time. As Wright shows us, education is fluid and can take on many different forms. For Wright, his “education” serves as both a means for survival in a social setting as well as a step towards social mobility and an exciting future career. It will be interesting to see how Wright’s education continues and takes on different forms through the rest of the book.
This post reminds me of the self-education theme that has run through many of the works we’ve read thus far––Douglass, Antin, and Franklin. Each of these writers have gone through different kinds of education. For Douglass, it was reading and writing. Antin was obsessed with self-teaching about American history, specifically focusing on George Washington. For Franklin, it was self-educating on morals and personal betterment. I think a good point here is that Wright’s self-education is more about social education and learning about how people (or groups of people) relate to one another.
I think it is interesting looking back on this post now because you chose to do education as your keyword. Furthermore, you talked about the same ideas in this post, which is pretty cool. The idea of informal vs formal education is really interesting because both types play a crucial role in how one grows up and the person that they become. We saw examples of both informal and formal education in all the texts we read.
I find that the concept of different ways of educating oneself is really relevant to our lives right now. We are receiving a formal education, but we are also gaining knowledge about living independently. It seems as though they are connected because they are happening at the same time, but they can be completely separate.
I remember in one of my lit classes in high school we read The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson, where the story of the guys life was told basically as the story of his education. Which I think is true of Wright, there are so many times when he opens a scene as being one in his series of lessons about life in the south or interaction with women, or life as a black man, or any of the other areas that provoke his thought. When we read Johnson’s book the teacher said that this emphasis on education was because of black peoples precarious position in society, and the consciousness that if you were black at any moment your world might totally change and might become very dangerous, and that education meant adaptability to a lot of the black community. I think this perspective makes Richard Wright’s feelings towards the effect that his practice of reading had on him, that he could no longer relate to people, that he had separated himself completely from society, and his assessment of his education as being detrimental to his ability to live within white power systems (which is also found in Douglass) indicative of an interesting split within black authors of the 20th century.