Wednesday, November 17, 2004

bell hooks: No Education is Politically Neutral

"...No education is politically neutral...We must combine theory and affirm and demonstrate pedagogical practices engaged in creating a new language, rupturing disciplinary boundaries, decentering authority, and rewriting the institutional and discursive borderlands in which politics becomes a condition for reasserting the relationship between agency, power, and struggle...By recognizing subjectivity and the limits of identity, we disrupt that objectification that is so necessary in a culture of domination... We must insist that students participate in education and not be passive consumers... I tell students not to confuse informality with a lack of seriousness, to respect the process...In principle, the classroom ought to be a place where things are said seriously - not without pleasure, not without joy - but seriously, and for serious consideration..." -

bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress -Education as the Practice of Freedom

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