Sadly, children's passion for thinking often ends when they encounter a world that seeks to educate them for conformity and obedience only.
Interpretation
The quote highlights how children's natural creativity and critical thinking can diminish when faced with an educational system that prioritizes conformity and obedience.
Bell Hooks emphasizes the importance of nurturing children's innate curiosity and passion for thinking. She suggests that the traditional educational systems often suppress individuality by focusing on conformity and obedience, leading to a loss of critical thinking abilities in children. This serves as a critique of educational structures that prioritize uniformity over creativity, urging for a more holistic and liberating approach to education.
In practice
During a seminar on education reform, this quote can be used to stress the importance of fostering creativity in schools.
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 PhDβs, 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 β 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.
Education was almost entirely a matter of luck β usually of ill-luck β in those distant days.
The methodologies of examining hip hop are borrowed from sociology, politics, religion, economics, urban studies, journalism, communications theory, American studies, transatlantic studies, black studies, history, musicology, comparative literature, English, linguistics, and other disciplines.
I never teach the same course twice.
My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices.
I do have a blurred memory of sitting on the stairs and trying over and over again to tie one of my shoelaces, but that is all that comes back to me of school itself.
We know that there will never be a great Newark unless there is a great public school system for our city.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.