Bell Hooks

4 Pages 892 Words

Education is supposed to be the uplifting of your mind, but nowadays education has become the stripping of culture and identity. Most people don’t like to talk about social issues such as racism, and sexism because they are admitting that these issues still exist. The same goes for education in the classroom. Most teachers avoid talking about anything hat has to do with race or sex because they worry about being politically in correct. The story “Pedagogy and Political Commitment: A Comment” by bell hooks talks about the struggle that she went through trying to teach students about racism, sexism, and domination.
Most minorities view education as a way to bridge the communication gaps between whites and themselves but others see education as a way to lose yourself. The author took it back to slavery the way the learned to live she writes “From slavery to the present, education has been revered in black communities, yet it has also been suspect.” In those days blacks were divided due to their education. Educated blacks felt better than the uneducated blacks, and it seemed the more they learned from the white man, the they would develop the ways of white-life. White-life being the way whites are brought up to live their lives. However uneducated blacks still encouraged their children to go out and get an education to better their life, but in the process not to lose sight of their heritage and the background they come from. Hooks talks about the her transition between a school full of mostly black people to a school were it was mostly white. Hooks expresses her thoughts on page 78 “At the white

school, we were no longer people with a history, a culture. We did not exist as anything other than primitives and slaves.” Because of this some blacks do not want to attend school because they are afraid of people making fun of them. White people see them as outsiders, people who might take their spot in the social str...