Sublime

How can any girl sustain the belief that she is loved, truly loved, when all around her she sees that femaleness is despised?

Women have not proven that they care enough about the hearts of men, about their emotional well-being, to challenge patriarchy on behalf of those men with whom they want to know love.

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

Then bell hooks stepped forward in 1981, writing in Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism: ‘The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that . . . women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labelling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that

bell hooks Institute.

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.

We need to highlight the role women play in perpetuating and sustaining patriarchal culture so that we will recognize patriarchy as a system women and men support equally, even if men receive more rewards from that system.

Females embrace this paradigm because they feel it is better to be a dominator than to be dominated. However, this is a perverse vision of gender equality that offers women equal access to the house of the dead. In that house there will be no love.