Too much eagerness to learn she regarded as something that could easily be seen as a threat to white authority (see hooks 1996a and 1996b)

‘Bussed to white schools’, bell hooks recalls, ‘we soon learned that obedience, and not zealous will to learn, was what was expected of us’. She writes that the knowledge they were supposed to soak up bore no relation to how they lived or behaved. Here she was confronted with an institution of all-white teachers who she judged were not interested in transforming the minds of their pupils but simply transferring irrelevant bodies of knowledge. When school integration was introduced in the 1960s, bell hooks transferred to an integrated school that was the complete opposite of her first school. She decided from very early on that she wanted to become a teacher and a writer.

They were committed to nurturing intellect so that their pupils could become scholars, thinkers or cultural workers (what she refers to as ‘black folks who used our minds’) (see hooks 1996a). (hooks 1994 p3).Īlmost all of bell hooks’ teachers were black women who she feels were on a mission. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself. Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone. To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. The all-black school she went to as a young girl she writes of as being ‘a place of ecstasy – pleasure and danger’. Her early schooling she describes as ‘sheer joy’.

She came from a poor working class family and worked her way up the academic ladder to become Distinguished Professor of English at City College in New York. (hooks 2003 p.xiv)īell hooks (1952- ) (nee Gloria Watkins) was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. As teachers we believe that learning is possible, that nothing can keep an open mind from seeking after knowledge and finding a way to know. Educating is always a vocation rooted in hopefulness. My hope emerges from those places of struggle where I witness individuals positively transforming their lives and the world around them.

Barry Burke assesses the contribution that bell hooks has made to thinking about education and sets this within the context of her biography and work.

Bell hooks on teaching