To value means to hold a valued entity in special esteem and consider it important. In “Graduation Day,” Maya Angelou recounts the narrative of graduating from the Lafayette County Training School in the small town of Stamps, Arkansas in 1940. Angelou calls attention to the value that she and her community share for education, starting with the community showering the graduates with gifts and ending with the community feeling reassured through understanding the Negro National Anthem at the end. During the graduation ceremony, the commencement speaker dismisses the graduates’ academic accomplishments, and Angelou questions if education holds worth for her. In the end, education equips Angelou to stand up for herself. In short, valuing education inspires people to overcome adversity.
Becoming motivated by education to rise above difficulties necessitates valuing education. In Angelou’s community, education constituted a cornerstone in its values, which Angelou recalls: “Among the negroes the tradition was to give presents to children going only from one grade to another. How much more important this was when the person was graduating at the top of the class” (Angelou, 2014, p. 183). The importance of education in the lives of the community manifests itself in the way people treat graduating from one class to another the same way as the graduates’ birthdays or Christmas. The significance of education to the author appears as well. She reflects, “My work alone had earned me a
Throughout life we go through many stepping stones, Maya Angelou's autobiographical essay "Graduation", was about more than just moving on to another grade. The unexpected events that occurred during the ceremony enabled her to graduate from the views of a child to the more experienced and sometimes disenchanting views of an adult. Upon reading the story there is an initial feeling of excitement and hope which was quickly tarnished with the abrupt awareness of human prejudices. The author vividly illustrates a rainbow of significant mood changes she undergoes throughout the story.
In America, we are told that it is the land where everything and anything is possible. For many years, it wasn’t like that for African American. With many hard work, strength, and courage African American manage to earn the right to an education. To the African American community education became more of a need than a want. We’ve learn that education is such a powerful asset that with it you are unstoppable. You can do so much if you put your time and energy to it. Having an education to African American is the one hope for a brighter and better
n American history, racial inequality has been a prevalent issue for many decades. Slavery is America's original sin. In the 1930s, racial inequality and segregation lived and breathed well. At this point in time, segregation in schools and other public places was still present. For preposterous reasons, white and black people had separate water fountains, restaurants, rest rooms, and areas on the bus. During this time full of racism and racial inequality, Maya Angelou was just a little girl growing up in St. Louis, Missouri. St. Louis is a town in the South, like many others, had inequalities at the time. In 1938 Maya Angelou was only ten years old. At this age, she worked for a lady named Mrs. Viola Cullinan. Maya Angelou wrote briefly about her time spent working for Mrs. Cullinan in her short story “Mary.” Maya Angelou's’ use of vivid, direct characterization and alternating childish voice to mature adult narrative diction filtered through her authentic first person point of view helps to prominently establish the theme of Angelou’s distaste for racial inequality throughout the short story.
Throughout life we go through many stepping stones, Maya Angelou's autobiographical essay "Graduation", was about more than just moving on to another grade. The unexpected events that occurred during the ceremony enabled her to graduate from the views of a child to the more experienced and sometimes disenchanting views of an adult. Upon reading the story there is an initial feeling of excitement and hope which was quickly tarnished with the awareness of human prejudices. The author vividly illustrates many mood changes she undergoes throughout the story.
Maya Angelou, named at birth, Marguerite Johnson was on April 4th, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri. Her and her family moved from St. Louis to Stamps, Arkansas, where she was raised growing up. Maya Angelou was an American author, dancer, screenwriter, actress, poet and civil rights activist. Angelou gained a majority of her fame with the memoir she wrote in 1969, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. This memoir made literary history as being the first nonfiction best-seller by an African-American woman. Angelou received many awards and honors throughout her entire career. These awards included two NAACP Image Awards in the outstanding literary work (nonfiction) category, in 2005 and 2009. Angelou became one of the most legendary and influential
Are encouraging words the uniting force when fighting injustice? In “Graduation Day,” Maya Angelou addresses how encouraging words affected the injustice she faced as a child. Angelou informs her audience about the influence encouraging words had on her and the people in her community. These uplifting words united her community in a time of overwhelming bias. Encouraging words unite oppressed people to fight injustice.
The thoughts and/or opinions of others often have to be overlooked or else they’ll ruin every happy moment that is to come. In Maya Angelou's story, Graduation, she discusses her eighth-grade graduation. Maya describes how she feels after listening to someone else opinion on her and the rest of African Americans of her graduating class at that time. This person's opinion had a huge impact on Maya herself, and the crowd. No one ever wants to feel wretched on the most memorable day of their life but this is exactly what took place on the day of Maya’s graduation.
For generations African Americans have been disadvantaged in America and effects of these injustices have made a lasting impression. Education is one of the leading problems in the black community. Though there have many reforms in education over the years, racial injustices still exist because no attention in placed on how legislature affects people of color. I was raised in a middle-class family of educators. My entire life I’ve been told to “stay in school, get an education, and work hard so that you can beat the system.” Recognizing the structural forces in my life has helped me understand my place in society. Being able to “understand everyday life, not through personal circumstances but through the broader historical forces that
“Graduation Day” illustrates Maya Angelou’s experience on her graduation day. All of Angelou’s feelings, reasoning, and thoughts of her graduation day are depicted between the pages of her short story. Her text covers multiple different aspects of a segregated community’s lifestyle and explains their decisions on coping with their limitations. The power of words impacts the community in several ways during Angelou’s story. Because words impact and shape people, they influence individuals into themselves.
Racial segregation was very dominant in the United States in the mid nineteen hundreds. This is the time that Maya Angelou was graduating from the eighth grade in Stamps Arkansas. The theme of racial segregation is well shown by the how different the schools of the African-Americans was compared to that of whites in the essay “Graduation” by Maya Angelou. In the essay the Angelou points out that Lafayette County Training School didn’t have a lawn, hedges, tennis court, climbing ivy as well as a fence the thing the white high school had. In every stage of life, graduation marks the advancement to the next different phase of life and is usually acknowledged by some ceremonies relating to the growth
Today, education enables us to enlarge our knowledge and open doors for opportunities to the path of having a good future. In the five readings, each written by a different author, there was a lesson learned and something to take away from each one. Reading through the passages by Mann, Moore, Malcolm X, Gatto, Rose, and Anyon, each author contributed his or her point of view on general public education. This topic can be very argumentative depending on the quality of education people receive. Education today is the single most important mean for individuals to achieve their personal goals in the workforce.
Education is something that has historically been a valuable asset to asserting one’s power and place in
In “Keeping Close to Home: Class and Education”, bell hooks writes about her experience with her family as she, a young educated black woman, first of her family, goes off to Stanford University. While her parents’ attitude towards her leaving her home to further her education was not the best, hooks used this struggle to make an educated point that while pursuing a higher education, it is important for young adults to maintain family and community values. While reading this essay, I not only agreed but also connected personally with hooks’ point about never forgetting where you come from due to my family’s immigrant background.
Hillary R. Clinton once said that “There cannot be true democracy unless Women’s voices are heard” (conference in Vienna, Austria 1997). That very brilliant quote relates to a very strong woman by the name of Maya Angelou. Angelou is “America’s most visible black female autobiographer and speakers” (scholar Joanne M. Braxton). She is known for her speeches, poems, and books, but what stood out to me the most was her 1993 inauguration speech when Bill Clinton was sworn into the White House. Ironically, in her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” Maya Angelou uses clear rhetoric, prehistoric metaphoric images, and inspirational concepts to alert her audience to treat the world differently.
As claimed by Malcolm X, education is crucial to one's life more than any other experience because you have the opportunity to understand your history and community better. As claimed in the passage “How I Discovered Words: A Homemade Education”, Malcolm focuses on how he would spend days