‘Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom’ by bell hooks is by far the most intellectually engaging and exciting book I’ve ever read.
Somehow I was able to recognize the fundamental impact of education at an early age. For me the notion of education is invested with a sanctity that I have never bestowed upon anything else. And to my great disappointment, as years went by, almost every encounter with real-life education that I’ve had has proven to be a sacrilege, a betrayal of the lofty ideal that I had in mind.
It may be easy to criticize something, yet it’s not so easy to see where it went wrong. What’s even harder is to figure out how to make it right. bell hooks does an amazing job identifying everything that makes education so crucially important and deconstructing this complex concept into a number of key components.
Education is a living thing that not merely interacts with but is informed and shaped by our society at large (along with its constructs of race, gender and class) and our individual experiences and perceptions in particular. Many of the ideas highlighted in this book have been on my mind for a long time, others are new, but regardless of that, I don’t think I was able to organize them in my head so neatly and so accurately. And obviously bell hook’s experience of teaching and engaging in feminist and critical thinking enables her to see well beyond the horizon that circumscribes the field of education for most people, students and teachers alike.
At the same time her expertise is not used as a basis for exclusion, but rather it is used to embrace the diversity of opinions, to promote dialogue and to commit to the sharing of ideas. This work is an invaluable foundation for both the theory and practice of education that binds them together, that challenges and transcends the notion that their dialectical interactions annihilate their unity.
I am confident that this book has the power to inspire students and professors to commit to education as the practice of freedom and I can only imagine how much more exciting our world can be and how much more we can achieve once we align our values and practices with this approach to education.
As a side note, I want to give credit to those professors who reinvigorated my belief that education can and should be a truly formative and inspiring experience. I encountered these professors during a brief but absolutely amazing stay at UCLA and they helped restore my faith in education and my passion for studying. Thank you Prof. Libby Lewis, Prof. Melvin Rogers and Prof. Fred D’Aguiar.
