Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Fr…

For hooks and Freire, the classroom is a mirror of the world. So, when the world struggles with sexism, racism, and the many types of prejudice shaping social life, our education system struggles with them as well. The space for learning can be one of oppression, or one of liberation.

Critical education theorist bell hooks, echoing Paulo Freire, calls this a “banking” model of education: we treat human learners as if they are safe-deposit boxes for knowledge and ideas, mere intellectual receptacles for beliefs. We then think of action as a kind of “withdrawal” from this bank of knowledge, as if our action and behavior were alway