bell hooks · Politics
In <em>Teaching to Transgress</em> (1994), hooks reimagined education as the practice of freedom: a classroom where teacher and student meet as whole people, where learning is shared and alive, and where the aim is not to fill students with facts but to help them become free.
hooks learned two opposite lessons about school. In the segregated schools of her Kentucky childhood, taught by Black women who knew their students’ families, education felt like liberation: learning was treated as a sacred act of resistance, a way for Black children to know their own worth in a world built to deny it. Then desegregation bused her into white schools where knowledge was suddenly detached from any concern for who she was - education became the memorizing of information and the obeying of authority, and the exciting communal work of learning went cold. Out of that contrast hooks built what she called engaged pedagogy: an effort to recover school as a place of freedom rather than obedience, where the point of learning is not to be filled and ranked but to become more fully alive and more capable of changing the world. The classroom, she insisted, could be the most charged and hopeful space in the whole institution.
hooks took from Paulo Freire a sharp diagnosis of conventional schooling: the banking model. On this model, the teacher is the one who knows and the students are empty accounts; education consists of the teacher making deposits of information which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. Freire saw that this is not neutral. A pedagogy that trains people to sit still, absorb what they are given, and never question the source is a pedagogy that produces obedience - it prepares people to accept domination rather than to challenge it. hooks agreed and drew the conclusion for her own classroom: students are not passive containers but active makers of meaning, and knowledge is something built with them, out of dialogue, rather than poured into them. Learning that treats people as things, she argued, cannot possibly be an education for freedom, because its very method is a lesson in submission.
A signature of engaged pedagogy is its refusal to split people into parts. The dominant model asks students to leave their bodies, feelings, histories, and spirits at the door and bring only a disembodied intellect to class - and asks the same of teachers. hooks rejected this mind-body-spirit division as itself a product of domination, and insisted that people learn as whole beings. That means the emotional life of the classroom is real and legitimate: excitement, joy, discomfort, and passion are not distractions from learning but part of how learning happens. It means a student’s lived experience can be a genuine source of knowledge, not a lapse from rigor. And it means the teacher’s wellbeing counts, because an exhausted or self-estranged teacher cannot offer the presence the method requires. Education as the practice of freedom, she argued, has to free the whole person, or it frees no one.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that hooks’s engaged pedagogy (from Teaching to Transgress ) treats education as the practice of freedom: rejecting the ‘banking’ model of passive students, insisting that teacher and student are whole persons whose wellbeing matters, and making the classroom a space of critical, liberatory excitement. Exp…
Leads to Paulo Freire.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.