the Will to Change

This book by bell hooks is a reflection on masculinity, more specifically how our grotesque normative patriarchy renders masculinity a force that resists the giving & receiving of love, thereby stunting the hearts of men & driving violence against women. Men are discouraged from getting (or staying) in touch with their genuine feelings, never learn to express themselves healthily, never develop appropriate faculties for managing their insecurities, so it spills out as hostility. It is with a true sense of hope & love that feminist theory as here beckons men to abandon such rigid & non-life-giving patterns of being & be brave enough to become vulnerable, which is an essential step on the road to becoming gentle & grounded. This book shows more clearly than anything else I've read or seen that patriarchal norms damage men arguably more than women - true, it is still women who will bear the brunt of the aggression spilling over from un-grasped emotions, but at least those women have stable & authentic inner lives. An absolute must-read for all men.*

* Yes, all men, I said it. Though as is oft the case, the people who most need to read this book are probably among the least likely to, because it's feminist theory & real men don't read that shit. Well, real men barely read anyway, right

Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom

This book, a collection of essays by bell hooks, is truly brilliant. I read it to explore ideas about the importance of education in shared interpretations of society for normative trends towards social justice (especially on things like race and gender), having been awakened in the last couple of years to critical theory and feminism, and having long been interested in education's potential for radicalisation (or perpetuation of hegemonic injustice) - and also because I'm deliberately expanding my bookshelf beyond the 'default'* of white men, and where better to start than enormously influential black woman bell hooks? Specifically, in a book about how learning can help alter individual attitudes through empowerment and so overturn prevailing inequalities?
   hooks's book is part of a trilogy of essay collections about how education can be a positive force for change and justice. Her other two books in this series look more in-depth at how classrooms can be used to cultivate diverse, tolerant, pluralistic communities, and how individual students can be encouraged to question norms so as to be willing to 'transgress' these and so be better-suited as spokespersons of freethinking liberty. This book is less specific, offering 'practical wisdom' distilled from hooks's years spent as a teacher and thinker on a huge range of complex issues - from the two mentioned above to difficulties of sex and race that infiltrate educational structures to how best to communicate or cooperate in certain contexts to the uses of certain emotions or aspects of human experience in forging effective education. The core focus is on 'engaged pedagogy', a model of education in which the teacher-student relationship is not one of didactic "I have knowledge, you do not, allow me to impart it while you sit there passively"-ness nor of utterly ineffective "all perspectives are equal and worthwhile so let's discover everything together, go on, small child, you first"-ness. Engaged pedagogy recognises that education hinges upon an inequality of knowledge, but doesn't allow this to obstruct formation of communities or entrench any other existing social/political inequalities (e.g. race/gender); teachers in this model are seen as empowering students to realise their full complex identities and engage with systems of knowledge and understanding through critically thinking about issues as they encounter them, from not only their perspective but from sharing critically-thought-about-perspectival-realisations between other members of their diverse classroom/society. There are thirty-two chapters exploring an enormous range of issues but all centred on this view of education. Each chunk is shortish and highly readable, and the overall viewpoint is utterly compelling, rich with hope for human capacities and a genuine warmth and almost Christian-esque love that surprised me given the righteous but unforgiving anger that characterises so much of contemporary identity politics, an intellectual sphere to which bell hooks probably is what Alfred Marshall is to neoclassical economics. Or something.
   I don't really have any of my own thoughts or reflections on this book - it's just astoundingly good. It's challenging, enlightening, and encouraging, and if you're even half-interested in working toward an egalitarian society and/or working in an even half-educational role, you should 100% read this book.



* 'Default' because you can pretty much guarantee that on most topics, the first well-reviewed or highly-recommended book you'll find will be by some white guy, probably Western and heterosexual, if it's a 'classic' probably dead. Seeking out alternative perspectives isn't that much effort and is deeply important.