ABSTRACT
This chapter explores certain aspects of the African-American experience and examines the implications of this through the work of significant writers. It demonstrates the arguments by adopting three authors' works of varying degrees of complexity; Mildred Taylor, Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, and in so doing indicating the ways in which their works can be interconnected and cross-referred around specific themes; childhood, education and race. The chapter shows how in childhood, when education and school are seen as priorities, African-American literature has stressed an alternative of learning which questions the official education of white America and emerges through aspects of everyday life. The chapter suggests an approach to the objectives, stimulate ideas may be studied, and raise important political and social questions relevant to any minority cultural group. African-American history has been too often dominated by the sense of 'not knowing' which has its roots in slavery and a system of denial which forbade education, and any kind of self-knowledge.
