bell hooks and educating the whole person

[Skip Zilla]

"bell hooks concern with the interlacing dynamics of 'race', gender, culture and class and her overall orientation to the whole person and to their well-being when connected with her ability to engage with educational practice in a direct way set her apart from the vast bulk of her contemporaries. Hers is a unique voice - and a hopeful one:

The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom with all its limitations remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labour for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom. [hooks, bell (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the practice of freedom, London: Routledge: 207]"*
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*Burke, Barry. (2004) 'bell hooks on education', the encyclopedia of informal education, www.infed.org/thinkers/hooks.htm

Is bell hooks' educational perspective and practice, founded on the cultural dynamics she experienced directly in her own life, relevant for the rest of us? I am convinced we shall make little headway in benefiting both the whole person and the whole society without being truly informed by Professor hooks' concerns and hopes.

Perhaps we can begin a continuing discussion of "educating the whole person?" What do you think?

[Connie Weber]

Yes, all for this. Since you've read bell hooks, Skip, perhaps you can suggest a starting point, maybe a particular book?

[Skip Zilla]

I have been deeply informed by reading bell hooks' writings.

I would suggest that anyone curious first take a look at a Wikipedia article about her. From there, either start reading one of her first books listed, or read one of the last books she's written more particularly on the subject of education. Then, post a reply to this discussion about what you've learned that you think others might benefit from learning. I'll inject my own two-cents worth in response along the way as discussions develop. I want to avoid skewing what others may find important on their own initiative--what good does it do me as a learner to hear back echoes of what I say, rather than original communication. On the other hand, I'll post a new discussion, at the outset at least, to overcome inertia.

[Skip Zilla]

Connie, you asked me where to start reading bell hooks. Here are some paragraphs excerpted from the preface of her 2004 book titled The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. (a link to an Amazon.com page about the book is available below)

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When I left home and went away to college, if I called home and my father answered, I hung up. I had nothing to say to him. I had no words to communicate to the dad who did not listen, who did not seem to care, who did not speak words of tenderness or love. I had no need for the patriarchal dad. And feminism had taught me that I could forget about him, turn away from him. In turning away from my dad, I turned away from a part of myself. It is a fiction of false feminism that we women can find our power in a world without men, in a world where we deny our connections to men. We claim our power fully only when we can speak the truth that we need men in our lives, that men are in our lives whether we want them to be or not, that we need men to challenge patriarchy, that we need men to change.

While feminist thinking enabled me to reach beyond the boundaries set by patriarchy, it was the search for wholeness, for self-recovery, that led me back to my dad. My reconciliation with my father began with my recognition that I wanted and needed his love-and that if I could not have his love, then at least I needed to heal the wound in my heart his violence had created. I needed to talk with him, to tell him my truth, to hold him close and let him know he mattered. Nowadays when I call home, I revel in the sound of my father's voice, his southern speech familiar and broken in all the right places. I want to hear his voice forever. I do not want him to die, this dad whom I can hold in my arms, who receives my love and loves me back. Understanding him, I understand myself better. To claim my power as a woman, I have to claim him. We belong together.

The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love is about our need to live in a world where women and men can belong together. Looking at the reasons patriarchy has maintained its power over men and their lives, I urge us to reclaim feminism for men, showing why feminist thinking and practice are the only way we can truly address the crisis of masculinity today. In these chapters I repeat many points so that each chapter alone will convey the most significant ideas of the whole. Men cannot change if there are no blueprints for change. Men cannot love if they are not taught the art of loving.

It is not true that men are unwilling to change. It is true that many men are afraid to change. It is true that masses of men have not even begun to look at the ways that patriarchy keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving. To know love, men must be able to let go the will to dominate. They must be able to choose life over death. They must be willing to change.

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(Because of length of text limit by Ning, this reply is continued in supplementary reply below.)

[Skip Zilla]

(Originally part of above posting, but continued here due to Ning length of text limitation)

Here's what Publishers Weekly said at Amazon.com about bell hooks' book The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love.

"In 12 slim chapters, hooks examines the stages of a man's life, from babyhood through boyhood to the teenage years into manhood. She finds patriarchy plays a role in most socio-sexual ills, as boys and men seek alienating sex as a substitute for the love that often seems, because of demands on families that destroy them or keep them from forming, unavailable to men: "Sex, then, becomes for most men a way of self-solacing. It is not about connecting to someone else but rather releasing their own pain." The men who can lead us out of patriarchal chains are "men of color from poor countries, men who live in exile, men who have been victimized by imperialist male violence"-the Dalai Lama for example. While she calls Will Smith films such as Men in Black and Independence Day tools of the patriarchy, hooks saves her big guns for J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, scornfully exposing them as foisted on us by "rich white American men" and no more than updated version of the British schoolboy books that fueled the fantasies of Victoria's empire. A better book to buy for children, she suggests, might be her own recent Be Bop Buzz."

Here's the book's table of contents:
Preface About Men
1 Wanted: Men Who Love
2 Understanding Patriarchy
3 Being a Boy
4 Stopping Male Violence
5 Male Sexual Being
6 Work: What's Love Got to Do with It?
7 Feminist Manhood
8 Popular Culture: Media Masculinity
9 Healing Male Spirit
10 Reclaiming Male Integrity
11 Loving Men

Perhaps a number of us can read and begin discussing how bell hooks believes we might act to raise boys and teach them as students in ways that free them to develop their masculinity in more hopeful and happy directions. Our boys need our attention and wisdom.

[Skip Zilla]

This reply serves only to provide a link to two bell hooks' poems in the Sometimes Poets group.