bell hooks is consistently an insightful person who is prescient in all sorts of areas while serving as an example for living to the rest of us. Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom is a more education-driven book, but would certainly offer wisdom for everyday people, as well.
While bell hooks’ work is always worth reading, the subtitle “Practical Wisdom” is a bit misleading for the teachers I imagine in the target audience. The book is essentially philosophy that sets the foundation for teaching and learning. One of hooks’ recurrent themes is that of love, which I find consistently inspiring and engaging. Drawing from Paolo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, hooks discusses how important it is for teachers to be authentic humans with integrity and a love for their students. The spirit of compassionate understanding that drives all of her work, including her social justice work, is inspiring to me, particularly when tensions and divisions are so easily demarcated—and even recognizing it, I’m not immune to it (I dismiss pretty much all conservatives out of the gate), so it’s a helpful reminder of the greater sense of purpose we have and the methods that actually work to get there.
hooks makes use of personal anecdotes and storytelling to great effect, especially in these tricky issues of social justice. For instance, one chapter is devoted to tears in the classroom. hooks talks about times that she and other teachers have cried. She then talks about times students have cried in class and, in particular, about times White students have cried in response to the injustices committed against Black people. The examples are instructive because, while hooks is always compassionate, she does not allow tears to detract from her sense of purpose in the classroom to guide the discussion towards meaningful critique.
To take a step back, Teaching Critical Thinking is an extension of hooks’ previous texts, specifically Teaching to Transgress. The books address similar concerns: engaged pedagogy, democratic education, a sense of purpose, integrity, the importance of storytelling and conversation, the role of the teacher and the intellectual in society, and so on. Teaching Critical Thinking is set up in 32 chapters, each of which is framed as a response to a question or follow-up to issues that arose in previous works. This means that one of the downsides of the text is that hooks recycles ideas, including quoting from her previous books. I suppose that’s the nature of academia, but it might have been nice to have some more original content here to justify a completely new text from Teaching to Transgress.
That said, some of hooks’ most instructive and resonant essays appear in this book. There are two I’d like to discuss in particular as timely and insightful. The first is called “Learning Past the Hate.” In this essay, hooks recounts her love of Emily Dickinson and William Faulkner, delving in particularly with the latter, and the relationship she has with troubling works. The essay is beautiful. It documents her experience with Faulkner and how his work resonates with her, despite his racist and sexist insertions. The essay is a moderate one: its central thesis is essentially that even when books have problematic backgrounds, there may still be reasons they are worth reading and they may prove instructive in other ways. The essay then discusses how those books ought not be removed from classrooms, but rather be historicized (cue Fredric Jameson). Books like those of Faulkner can be instructive for their stylistic ingenuity or depth of feeling towards characters and so on; the problematic aspects can also be instructive in examining the historical influence of white supremacy, patriarchy, and so on on the text. I also appreciated that hooks notes how she would be much less sympathetic towards current books that voice similarly hateful attitudes. It’s a great balance that proves instructive for selecting texts for high school curricula.
The other essay that resonates most with me as an English teacher is “The Joy of Reading.” While the essay is ostensibly about the importance of reading in our lives and the value it provides to nourish our spirits, it also provides an incisive critique of the aims of education. People generally have the perception of education as an instrumental good: it is worth being educated so that you can get a job and make money. That has and remains, in my mind, an inherently harmful viewpoint that makes people subservient to capitalism rather than as agents capable of critiquing it. Similarly, the low rates of literacy in the United States and beyond preclude meaningful participation in democracy. It’s a wonderful essay I’d like to share with my students to show why learning, reading, and thinking is so important as more than a simple instrument for wealth.
Another component that I love about that “Joy of Reading” essay is how it intersects with Marxist sympathies and concerns. It actually evokes Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” hooks talks about the associations of books and perceptions of wealth. She notes that “there was a time in our nation’s history when purchasing a book (rather than checking it out from a public library) was usually a sign of being a member of an affluent class or that one was striving to move from a lower class position” (130). She then talks about the abundance of reading material and mass consumption that has devalued reading: “this world of abundant reading material has not created a culture where reading books is the ‘cool’ thing to do. It has made it possible for more people to own a book, even to throw a book away” (130). She notes the way that books have been devalued as a commodity and how that feeds into an atmosphere of anti-intellectualism. If these reviews were illustrated, there would be an innocuous map of Florida inserted here without comment.
Actually, it would be worth commenting on a passage that sets up the central ‘problem’ for the book that is likely to bring people together, though for backwards reasoning. hooks comments on the lack of thinking in society and its relationship with schools. She writes, “Most children are taught early on that thinking is dangerous. Sadly, these children stop enjoying the process of thinking and start fearing the thinking mind” (8). She continues, “By the time most students enter college classrooms, they have come to dread thinking. Those students who do not dread thinking often come to classes assuming that thinking will not be necessary, that all they will need to do is consume information and regurgitate it at the appropriate moments. In traditional higher education settings, students find themselves yet again in a world where independent thinking is not encouraged” (8).Taken out of context, the political right would likely find that a lot of that quotation resonates with them. The so-called ‘liberal’ indoctrination that they see so rampant at colleges would assume the same qualities that hooks identifies here, though each sees the critique from a different lens. The question, in some ways, comes down to what counts as thinking.
As I’ve mentioned, bell hooks is well-versed in intersectional critique of the world. She considers students as whole beings, not shying away from their spirituality, eros, or emotional well-being. It’s quite common these days for the school system to focus on those who are most obviously struggling, but hooks helps to highlights concerns for even, and sometimes especially, high-achieving students. In one essay, she writes about “nerds or geeks, students who are often gifted at book learning, carry the residue of pain and trauma” (70). There’s a beautifully caring passage that follows regarding the relationship between trauma and academic pursuits. I’ll quote the passage in full here, but note the intersectional concerns with race, gender, and class:
“Many of us are simply emotionally numb, shut down, disassociated. I was not a fun girl at school or at college. Laughter, humor in general, was associated in my mind with letting go. My biggest goal in life during high school and undergraduate college years was not to let go, but to hold on–to keep a hold on life. Very little appeared ‘funny’ to me, and almost nothing was worthy of laughter. // When I entered graduate school, it became all the more unnecessary for me not to be seen as a fun girl. Striving for success in the world of sexist academia, a male-dominated environment where female students were told every day by professors that we were not really as good as men, made it all the more important to appear serious. It was important to be perceived as capable of doing academic work. When race and class was added to the equation, for a black female it was all the more vital to adopt a persona of seriousness. Throughout my college years friends and colleagues would often let me know that they would ‘sure like to see you drunk or stoned’ because they believed I was too serious, that I could have more fun if I just lightened up a bit” (70).
hooks then goes on to talk about bringing humor into the classroom and the vulnerability of it in the classroom. It’s a wonderful short chapter. Humor becomes a pathway to intimacy, which I think feeds into the idea of love. Essentially, that’s what it all comes down to: to teach is an act of love, and love is what compels people towards thoughtful care and is at the core of revolution.
I’d like to close out this short review of hooks’ work by referring to one of the final essays in the collection. The essay is called “Moving Past Race and Gender” (note how moderates can likely find some middle-ground here). hooks responds to the criticism of her writing for a broader audience by suggesting that she remains as militant but takes an approach of reaching the masses “who are seeking life-changing theory and practice” (176). It’s an act of love to share learning with a greater audience. She concludes the passage with a statement that seems fundamental to her oeuvre: “Hence they will not understand that it is the most militant, most radical intervention anyone can make to not only speak of love, but to engage the practice of love. For love as the foundational of all social movements for self-determination is the only way we create a world that domination and dominator thinking cannot destroy. Anytime we do the work of love, we are doing the work of ending domination” (176).
I hope I can carry that optimism with me in doing the work of teaching and learning and advocating for others. May we carry the patience, care, and genuine desire for everyone to thrive in the work that we do. Certainly divisiveness has its place (e.g. trans rights is a non-negotiable), but replicating the hatred that drives dominator thinking may not, in fact, get us anywhere.
Happy reading—it changes the world, after all!
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