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.
Why administrators are respected and schoolteachers are not: An administrator is paid a lot for doing very little, while a teacher is paid very little for doing a lot.
Boosting education will be a direct counterbalance to Boko Haram's appeal. In particular we must educate more young girls, ensuring they will grow up to be empowered through learning to play their full part as citizens of Nigeria and pull themselves up and out of poverty.
I didnt go to film school, i went to films
Your ancestors fought for you to have a share in that institution over there. It's yours. See the school board, and every Friday night hold your meetings there. Have your wives clean it up Saturday morning for the children to enter Monday. Your organization is not a praying institution. It's a fighting institution. It's an educational institution along industrial lines. Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living!
We cannot afford to lose talented young black people, who make it to university, overseas, or worse, to let other talented black people be put off by the notion that university is somehow not for them.
...no one is born a great cook, one learns by doing.
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