bell hooks and How Society Places Value on Education

Reposted from: http://leahmacvie.com/2014/08/values-education/

In class, we read Teaching to Transgress (1994) by bell hooks.

For hooks, a reduced value on education can have a severe effect on her as a student. Where the classroom should have been a place of “promise and possibility”, it instead felt “more like a prison” (p. 4). hooks cites the work of Paolo Freire, “someone who understood learning could be liberatory” (p. 6). She calls for a return to passionate teaching, and students who are engaged in learning.

Across the academic spectrum, assessment has taken over. Do you agree with hooks that the excitement of learning has been replaced with a seriousness to assess? How did education get so serious? Learning should be exciting. It should be liberating.

This idea of oneself in the present is sometimes the result of one's aims for the future. Yet, most curriculums are only concerned with what the students should know in the present, and not what they should know for their future. Not all teachers teach with the future student in mind. In fact, hooks mentions that some teachers have “intensely hostile responses to the vision of liberatory education that connects the will ‘to know’ with the will ‘to become” (p. 18-19). This unliberated education greatly affects (or lowers) student expectations, as hooks writes, to be one that does not address “the connection between what they are learning and their overall life experiences” (p. 19). This is a kind of serious education that strips out, not only the excitement in learning, but the connection to real life.

hooks points out that this fear of a liberated education is positioned in the curriculum, as well. Her experiences have revealed, “how deep-seated is the fear that any de-centering of Western civilizations, of the white male canon, is really an act of cultural genocide” (p. 32). Our history continues to shape us and, therefor, the curriculum will have to adopt new perspectives of this history. Especially in the United States, we must continue to question what our collective narrative is and possibly accept that it is not as flat as we may have thought. Curriculums can only reflect multicultural perspectives with deliberate and consistent core curriculums, coordination and technology assistance. It may be impossible for a curriculum to cover everything it has to cover in the allotted credit hours, and so even the concept and idea of attending college for a prescribed amount of time may have to be challenged.

Teaching a multicultural education, however, should be exciting. It should make the teacher feel empowered and excited about the freedom, autonomy, and possibilities. As hooks points out, however, many teachers “fear losing control in a classroom where there is no one way to approach a subject- only multiple ways and multiple references” (p. 36). I will leave my opinion out that this boggles me- who wants to do the same thing in the same way for 30+ years? This fear of losing control is all part of the cycle- teacher–>student–>teacher education–>teacher… Not only does the ‘unliberated education cycle’ discourage a multicultural education, but so do the social rules that govern colleges and schools. hooks points out that she was often asked if she was on a scholarship at Stanford, as if “receiving financial aid “diminished” one in some way” (p. 181). Thomas Jefferson, founder of the University of Virginia and, some would claim, father of current higher education, used the line “raked from the rubbish” to describe, what he viewed as, a necessary way to promote talent from lower classes, thereby promoting these ‘lucky’ students to a higher class. Higher education still follows these guidelines, hundreds of years later, through scholarships and equal opportunity programs. Though, as hooks points out, there is a stigma that scholarships and such programs denote a lower class and a different kind of ‘priveledge’ to ‘ride the coattails’ in order to obtain a degree for free and for little effort.

Consider this reading about multicultural and engaged education. If society truly valued education, would it value its teachers in serious comparison to other professions, would it expect that colleges and schools were an exciting place to open one’s mind and engage in radical pedagogy, and would it require that taxes and government spending go towards providing free education for all so that, hopefully, students could be excited to learn in an environment that didn’t support a class culture? In 100-150 words, share your thoughts on these questions.


References

hooks, . (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge.