Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

In her introduction to Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks opens with her experience as a student. As a child, she attended black segregated schools. Those classrooms were liberating places of joy. Loving black women taught hooks and made a point to know their students. In addition to being a loving, safe place for learning, the classroom was also a place to push boundaries, as teachers encouraged students to question indoctrinated beliefs. These black women teachers were to have a profound influence on hooks’ later thinking of educational practice.

Her experience of learning radically changed with the desegregation practices that followed the Supreme Court’s Brown vs Board of Education ruling of 1954, which made the practice of segregation illegal. hooks was bussed to desegregated white schools with mainly white teachers. The racist attitudes of many of the teachers and students made the classroom no longer a place of learning and joy but instead a confrontational space where she had to counter the racist stereotypes existing in the classroom.

When she attended Stanford University as an undergraduate, she was shocked to see that the professors had no joy in teaching. She was also surprised by the fact that most professors had trouble communicating and ran their classrooms through an imbalance of power: “they often used the classroom to enact rituals of control that were about domination and the unjust exercise of power” (5).