The book centers around how hooks wanted to shape herself and her teaching in a way that did not mirror her experiences as a student, but rather transgressed the systems of domination. Paulo’s work has been living water for me.Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom sees the late bell hooks discussing and engaging with her past as a student and then as an educator in relation to education as a potentially profound and transformative experience that can tax the mind, body, and spirit due to opposition and oppression that is very evidently still in place in our educational systems. We would have to consider what the vast majority of the peo ple in the world who are thirsty must do to obtain water. If we approach the drinking of water that comes from the tap from a global perspective we would have to talk about it differently. It is an expression of luxury and not just simply a response to the condition of water. Even our ability to see the water that come through the tap as unclean is itself informed by an imperialist consumer per spective. Many people purchase special water because they consider tap water unclean-and of course this purchasing is a luxury. Look at what most people do with water in this country. And you can especially justify your disposal of something that you consider impure. When you are privileged, living in one of the richest countries in the world, you can waste resources. For me this is an experience that corresponds very much to the way individuals of privilege respond to the use of water in the First World context.

Because you are thirsty you are not too proud to extract the dirt and be nourished by the water. Think of the work as water that contains some dirt. To have work that promotes one’s liberation is such a powerful gift that it does not matter so much if the gift is flawed. I came to Freire thirsty, dying of thirst (in that way that the colonized, marginalized subject who is still unsure of how to break the hold of the status quo, who longs for change, is needy, is thirsty), and I found in his work (and the work of Malcolm X, Fanon, etc.) a way to quench that thirst. In talking with academic feminists (usually white women) who feel they must either dismiss or devalue the work of Freire because of sexism, I see clearly how our different responses are shaped by the standpoint that we bring to the work. “It is feminist thinking that empowers me to engage in a constructive critique of Freire’s work (which I needed so that as a young reader of his work I did not passively absorb the worldview presented) and yet there are many other standpoints from which I approach his work that enable me to experience its value, that make it possible for that work to touch me at the very core of my being.

Teaching to transgress hooks