Theme of education in literature and society

Education

Both Maya Angelou and Mike Rose describe ethnic and class barriers in education, showing how to overcome the odds stacked against them. Gender posed an additional barrier for Angelou, who writes about her experiences with the segregated public school system in "Graduation." At the titular ceremony at her Black public school in Stamps, Arkansas, Angelou recalls the deep humiliation she and her classmates suffered when two white men usurped the ceremony to declare that while the white school received upgrades to its science and arts classrooms, their Lafayette County Training School would be privileged to receive an asphalt upgrade. In "I Just Wanna Be Average," Rose recalls his friend's words that encapsulated the resignation of students labeled as "vocational" or "working class." In a society that proclaims the rights to liberty and justice for all, these two writers illustrate the perpetual problem of educational tracking and the effects of tracking on young students.

Few American students will not be able to relate to the theme of education addressed in Angelou's and Rose's writing. We grow up as if our futures were predetermined based on our social class status, gender, and ethnicity. Reality conflicts with the values we are taught about in social studies classes: that the American Dream is available to anyone who works hard enough. Angelou in particular acknowledges the "impertinence" of the ironic platitudes recited at the graduation ceremony (26). The Lafayette students had just finished their "passionate" recitation of not one but three anthems but were subsequently beaten into submission and near-despair (Angelou 22). Rose refers less emphatically to the conflict between the American mythos and reality, but still understood the class stratification that belied equality and social justice.

However, both Angelou and Rose describe their inspirations: individual leaders to inspired them to transcend and overcome. For Angelou the moment of release arrived when the class valedictorian turned toward his fellow students and sang the Negro National Anthem with intense pride. The author notes, "We were on top again. As always, again. We survived...I was no longer simply a member of the proud graduating class of 1940...I was a proud member of the wonderful, beautiful Negro race," (Angelou 27). Rose received his inspiration from a disheveled English instructor at his Catholic school: Jack MacFarland. MacFarland lifted Rose's "scholastic indifference," commanded respect, and became a "role model," (359). Their stories seem almost saccharine like a Hollywood movie about the inner-city teacher who lifts up his angry students and leads them to all as. The fact that Angelou and Rose write from personal experience forces readers like me to reconsider what labels I contended with as a student, how I dealt with boundaries related to race, class, and gender, and who or what inspired me to overcome them.

Unlike Angelou and Rose, I did not understand the reality of tracking in the American educational system. I assumed that I was no different from anyone else and that my classmates and I were enjoying the fruits of our hard work. I didn't think of myself as being coerced into any career path as Angelou and Rose were, because I was part of what Rose describes as the "curriculum of the elite," (355). Whereas students of Lafayette County Training School "were maids and farmers, handymen and washerwomen," the students I knew were whatever they wanted to be: future doctors, lawyers, business consultants, and writers (Angelou 25). I had no idea that beyond our cozy classrooms, a legion of students like Angelou and Rose were being told that it would be "farcical and presumptuous" to aspire to greatness (Angelou 25). As Rose puts it, "If you're a working-class kid in the vocational track, the options you'll have...will be constrained in certain ways: you're defined by your school as 'slow,' you're placed in a curriculum that isn't designed to liberate you but to occupy you," (Rose 355). The author adds that even when vocational students are trained to develop special skills "the training is for work the society does not esteem," (p. 355). Thus the cycle of social injustice perpetuates itself and the poor stay poorer in a world in which wealth is unevenly distributed.

To cope, Angelou and Rose both discovered sources of personal pride. Angelou discovered racial solidarity and heralded the creative input of Black poets and musicians. Rose took a different approach, opting to "reject intellectual stimuli...cultivate stupidity...convert boredom from a malady into a way of confronting the world," (355). When MacFarland later opened a door into the world of the literati, Rose responded in similarly rebellious ways: through the "embrace of the avant-garde," (363). Maya Angelou and Mike Rose both discovered their voices in opposition to the dominant culture and used that voice to pierce the veil of oppression. They acknowledged and readily critiqued the barriers and boundaries that remained in place while singing their hearts out from beyond the white picket fence.

I had no role models as stunning as Jack MacFarland. However, reading Angelou and Rose reminds me of two teachers who saw in me potential and talent and encouraged me to pursue my education with vigor and certainty. Had they not challenged me I might not have discovered my innate love of learning. More importantly, these teachers showed me how to take advantage of whatever funds of knowledge I possessed without worrying about the barriers I might face as a minority student.

Interestingly, both Angelou and Rose remained relatively safe and comfortable behind the barriers that had been erected for them at school. Angelou refers to the "nobility" of her graduating class and the joy that naturally permeated the air during the ceremony: when an aura of hope and expectation surrounded all the Lafayette students. Their celebration was punctuated by the shock Donleavy and the two white men delivered, when the all-Black graduating class were told which heroes to worship, which role models to emulate. Angelou particularly recalls the iniquity of evoking the names of track stars to insinuate that the best Blacks could ever hope to be was a champion athlete and that the door to the arts, sciences, and humanities would forever remain closed off to them. She notes, "The white kids were going to have a chance to become Galileos and Madame Curies and Edisons and Gauguins, and our boys (the girls weren't even in on it) would try to be Jesse Owenses and Joe Louises," (Angelou 24). Angelou means no disrespect to Owens or Louis. She simply points out that equal education was a myth in her day.

Equal educational opportunity remains a myth fifty years later, as students who are disadvantaged in terms of where they live or what language they speak in the home or what their parents do for a living are pushed into educational tracks they did not ask for. In his expose of mediocrity, Rose shows how and why many working-class students give up. Their only means of creating dignity was to relish their role as "the common Joe," and to celebrate being average (Rose 355). The vocational track reeked of "suffocating madness" but became a means by which to create personal and collective identity (Rose 355).