Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“Most of my professors were not the slightest bit interested in enlightenment. More than anything they seemed enthralled by the exercise of power and authority within their mini-kingdom, the classroom.”

The professors that hooks encountered in her college classrooms often failed to fulfill hooks’s desire for an engaged pedagogy. Rather than creating classrooms based on critical thinking and the mutual creation of knowledge, they preferred the “banking system of education,” in which they held absolute authority, doling out information in lectures to students, who would memorize and store that information for whenever a withdrawal was needed.

“I learned that far from being self-actualized, the university was seen more as a haven for those who are smart in book knowledge but who might be otherwise unfit for social interaction.”

hooks’s experience in college classrooms as an undergraduate made her realize how unprepared many professors are for teaching. While professors may have strong subject knowledge, their interpersonal and communication skills are often undeveloped, leaving them unprepared for engaging a classroom full of diverse students with diverse needs.

“Remembering this past, I am most struck by our passionate commitment to a vision of social transformation rooted in the fundamental belief in a radically democratic idea of freedom and justice for all.”

As hooks contemplates attending her twentieth high school reunion, the first time her reunion will be racially integrated, she remembers with fondness her friendships with those who were similarly devoted to social justice. This was a difficult time as desegregation revealed raw, racist feelings that easily developed into confrontations and dangerous situations, as hooks experienced when a group of angry white men who almost drove her and her white friend off the road. She realizes that it has been hard to find white people committed to social justice since that time.