Moving Beyond Limits: The Educational Path in Maya Angelou’s Collected Auto(edu)biographies

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

—Nelson Mandela

A wise pedagogue once said, “The substance of what we know may change us, but changing how we know can revolutionize us.”

—Brita L. Gill-Austern (218)

We owe the truth, not just the facts. I’m celebrating my 84^th year on this planet. I’ve seen many things. I’ve learned many things. I’ve certainly been exposed to many things and I’ve learned something: I owe it to you, to tell you.

—Maya Angelou, Facebook

Almost all societies focus on education because it is essential to people’s prosperity and freedom. It is the dynamic force for the actualization of socio-economic national development aims and one of the main pillars in the progress of any society. Maya Angelou was, until the time of her death in 2014, preoccupied with education. She was a member of the 2013 “Building a GradNation” Summit¹ that discussed ways to improve education and end the high school dropout crisis. She was a powerful supporter of life-long formal and informal education and social responsibility.

The educational path advocated by Angelou underscores the necessity of education in self-development and eventually the development of the whole society for diverse reasons. Angelou expressed that her objective as a writer was “to provide encouragement and direction” (qtd. in Braxton 201) because people often, as Edward Said (1935–2003), the Palestinian-American writer, intellectual, literary theorist, and university professor suggested, “feel the need to look at the writer-intellectual as someone who ought to be listened to as a guide to the confusing present, and also as a leader of a faction, tendency, or group vying for more power and influence” (20). Despite her engulfment within the black experience, Angelou voiced her concern for humanity at large, aiming her work at “audiences of all colors and creeds” and “simply refused to have her life narrowed and proscribed” (Conversations 78). Though The Autobiographies truly present the past, it is the past that helps in shaping peoples’ present. Memory is important to everyone who cares about change. Angelou is an advocate of George Santayana’s famous saying which states that “he who does not learn from his history is doomed to repeat it” (qtd. in Conversations 232).

Through an interdisciplinary approach guided by Ivan Illich’s education networks,² this paper attempts to highlight Angelou’s journey towards self-education and self-positioning as an intellectual in Society by examining her Collected Autobiographies.³ Numerous studies were concerned with Angelou’s dislocation as an African American, none of them extensively focused on her educational path.⁴ Thus, this paper will pinpoint the educational path of this revolutionary literate writer, aiming to identify Angelou’s path as a paragon that can inspire others, for reviewing the past in relation to the present and utilizing the gained knowledge will aid in succeeding within the present constraints and in forming the future. This article first introduces the difference between the three types of education: formal, informal, and non-formal; thereafter, it presents Illich’s education networks and, finally, closely investigates Angelou’s path in the light of each type.

Philip Hall Coombs and Manzoor Ahmed distinguish between the three types of education: formal, informal, and non-formal. According to them, formal education is concerned with schools and training establishments, informal is mainly linked with books, friends, and family, and non-formal with community groups, circles, and organizations. Tanja R. Müller suggests that most societies aim for “formal education systems [to] center on creating a more just social order. . . . The rationale behind education as an instrument to promote social change is twofold: the formation of conscious citizens motivated by collective goals, coupled with the transmission of skills necessary to overcome underdevelopment and achieve self-sustaining growth” (635). Yet, is it formal education alone that forms conscious citizens with collective consciousness, and is it formal education alone that equips the individual with the skills needed for self-actualization and survival?

Though “schooling...