I entered the classroom with the conviction that it was crucial for me and every other student to be an active participant, not a passive consumer...education as the practice of freedom.... education that connects the will to know with the will to become. Learning is a place where paradise can be created.
Interpretation
Education should empower students to actively engage in their learning process rather than simply absorbing information.
In this quote, Bell Hooks emphasizes the importance of active participation in education, suggesting that true learning is an act of freedom that connects one's desire to know with personal growth. She envisions education as a transformative space where students can cultivate their potential and create a fulfilling and liberated existence.
In practice
In a speech about educational reform, I quoted Bell Hooks to stress the importance of student engagement.
Privilege is not in and of itself bad; what matters is what we do with privilege. I want to live in a world where all women have access to education, and all women can earn PhD’s, if they so desire. Privilege does not have to be negative, but we have to share our resources and take direction about how to use our privilege in ways that empower those who lack it.
Self-love is the foundation of our loving practice. Without it our other efforts to love fail. Giving ourselves love we provide our inner being with the opportunity to have the unconditional love we may have always longed to receive from someone else.
While privacy strengthens all our bonds, secrecy weakens and damages connection. Lerner points out that we do not usually "know the emotional costs of keeping a secret" until the truth is disclosed. Usually, secrecy involves lying. And lying is always the setting for potential betrayal and violation of trust.
When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominator culture.
Once you do away with the idea of people as fixed, static entities, then you see that people can change, and there is hope.
I still think it's important for people to have a sharp, ongoing critique of marriage in patriarchal society — because once you marry within a society that remains patriarchal, no matter how alternative you want to be within your unit, there is still a culture outside you that will impose many, many values on you whether you want them to or not.
I enjoy popularisation and I think I'm reasonably good at it. I also think it's a duty. It's just so pedagogically stupid to forget how difficult one found these ideas oneself to begin with.
All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian's footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small.
My favorite subject was recess. Fortunately for me, I had a mother who believed I was smart.
My hunch is that if we allow ourselves to give who we really are to the children in our care, we will in some way inspire cartwheels in their hearts.
I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.
Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead for the future.
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