Teaching to Transgress
1994 • 200 pages
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15
Ratings3
Average rating4
In Teaching to Transgress bell hooks—writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual—writes about a new kind of education, *education as the practice of freedom*. Teaching students to "transgress" against racial, sexual and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for hooks, the teacher's most important goal.
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It is amazing (and disappointing) to me that bell hooks wrote this book more than 20 years ago, and so much of it seems like it could have been written today. The subtitle of the book, Education as the Practice of Freedom, is a great summary for the heart of the matter; hooks writes with conviction about the practice that persists of education as maintaining order and the status quo, the concept of education as banking (depositing knowledge into a student) described by Paolo Freire. This system has continued for so many years because it upholds the ruling world order. Educating as the practice of freedom is counter-cultural, and hooks will make you believe in the possibilities. I particularly appreciate that hooks is a critical activist, but she ultimately believes that education is an expression of love. I want to believe that critical perspectives and activism should be centered in love.
