Over the duration of my MPhil in Education, I kept feeling the need to engage more with material that deals with post-structuralism and education, or at least deals with concepts within education in a post-structural manner. Understanding the need to widen my horizons within feminist, post-modern and educational scholarship, I read the introductory chapter of Teaching To Transgress and was instantly, if you excuse the pun, ‘hooked’. As a follow-up I began reading works by Peter McLaren, Henry Giroux and Michael Apple as well (all white males). My motivation to actually study ‘education’ was rooted in my experience as a Teach For India fellow and what brought me specifically to TISS was Freire’s ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’. For my master’s dissertation I used some of Erich Fromm’s work to locate some of my findings. As a student of psychology, my interests were drawn to critical psychology, specifically the post-modern (post-Lacanian and Foucauldian turn in psychology) critique of mainstream psychology. On hindsight it seems that my reasons for selecting this book are very much rooted in my history and I would like to briefly mention that in order to express why I chose this book. I have attempted to do just that over the duration of reading this book and the process of writing this essay. Throughout her book she stresses on students needing to interrogate their location in terms of their histories. This is education as the practice of freedom.”įor bell hooks, the above quote marked the conclusion of the book, but for me, it has kindled hope for a new beginning. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor 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. The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. Book Reviewed Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom.

Bell hooks on teaching