Hooks Essay

bell hooks, American feminist writer and literary critic, once said, "The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility." Even when she wrote these words over 20 years ago in 1994, there was a clear, unsullied idea of what a child's education should be composed ofв”Ђpossibilities. In the time of hooks' writing, America's people were being tested on their strength as the deindustrialization of major cities occurred, leaving most of the factory workers without money and homeless. After Reagan left office, there was an abundance to clean up. The country's people were trying to create possibilities that might work out. The Americanschool system remains about what hooks said: possibilities. Even with the media continuously...show more content...

We see constant disparities in funding within our school system between class and between race. Because of this, we need to regulate the funding between the "good school bad school poor school rich school" paradigm. Why aren't there already laws permitting and enforcing equal funding? In the ruling of Rodriguez vs. San Antonio Independent School district, it was found that even if it was completely morally ethical, laws against or for inequitable funding are not in the constitution and therefore it cannot be ruled upon in the high court. So, even if two schools in the same district are within a 10,000 dollars funding difference, a pupil cannot do anything about it because it doesn't say anything about it in the constitution. States in the deep south, like Texas and Alabama, get the least funding, says a study done by the National Law Center for Education. The U.S. average for funding per state is $10,132 for one pupil. Tennessee's money spent per pupil is $6,839. Also, Tennessee has one of the lowest GDPs and its education effort is one of the lowest. Why is this? Because Tennessee still didn't take advantage of its fiscal capacity, and that's why it received an F on the effort scale. In a study done by Education Trust, it said that there is a 1,200 dollar gap between the districts with the most poverty and the districts with the least

Get more content

Hooks: A Short Story

Tendrils of searing, agonising pain surged across the young woman's flesh, pervading into the layers of her skin as a curved, serrated–edged blade glided smoothly across the sensitive skin of her stomach. Hooks, scorching hot, were embedded deep into the ashen flesh of her shoulders. She sunk her teeth into the plump flesh of her bottom lip, sobs piling up at the hollow of her throat and threatening to spill as the twenty–one year old woman thrashed against the many hands holding her down. Her arms were numb, splayed away from her body at a perpendicular angle. Long, delicate and pale fingers –calloused by hard work and long hours– were attached to bony wrists, bound by thick, wrought–iron chains, barbed with sharp needles, blood oozing from

Get more content

Is Education Equal?

The United States provides our society with the undeniable right to learn. The right to higher education is not limited to the middle and upper classes; it allows the less privileged, minorities, as well as both sexes, to receive an equal education. Two arguments which present interesting views on higher education are bell hook’s “Keeping Close to Home'; and Adrienne Rich’s “What Does a Woman Need to Know?'; Hooks views higher education with a concern for the underprivileged, whereas Rich views it with a concern for women. Of the two works, I personally do not agree with Rich’s argument.

Bell hooks views...show more content...

Society, peers, and educators make assumptions that label the underprivileged and minorities as “‘lower class ’ people'; who have “no beliefs or values';(88). Professors expect these students to perform badly because of their past and their reputation in today’s society. The students are not given the fair chance other students receive. Knowing the way society portrays them, the students keep to themselves. Even after they prove to be serious and capable students, they are still looked down upon.

Hooks, at first, thought that in order to succeed in college, she must change who she was, to blend in with her peers. She said many “believe that assimilation is the only possible way to survive, to succeed.';(89). After going through the transition and facing these obstacles herself, hooks came to the conclusion that this was not the case. She has maintained close ties with her family, knows where she came from, and has succeeded in life. Hook’s essay tells us that you can maintain close relationships with home and still succeed. Not only are the underprivileged discriminated against, but women are too. One extreme feminist side, Adrienne Rich claims that women are not getting what they deserve when it comes to higher education. Rich states, “There is no woman’s college today which is providing young women with Get

Bone Black In the book Bone Black, Bell Hooks gives a vivid look into her childhood. She starts off by talking about a quilt that her mother gave her from her mother. She thinks that this is special because her mother gave it to her and not one of her other sisters. Then she goes into describing how the children in her family never knew that they were poor until they grew up. They liked the dolls that they played with and the food that they ate. They never wondered why they didn't have the things that their white neighbors did have. You would seldomly hear them complain because they had to walk to school and the white kids rode the school bus. She thought that they had a pretty normal family.

In the next few chapters...show more content...

As time went on she became more involved in church, and religious activities. She got baptized and saved at the church that she always attended. She grew to love the black church that she grew up mocking. The old lady that always sat in the front row made her realize how deep the roots of her church were.

She began to find herself wanting to stay in the house to read instead of going out to play. She first started reading to escape from the problems of her daily life. She would read books about black history, religion and love. When she becomes old enough to date boys she begins to read books about pornography, not knowing that these books were not fit for a girl her age. Then she begins to pleasure herself in private, but after her sisters catch her she begins to feel ashamed and never does it again.

When she goes away to college she joins the campus ministry. She thought that this would be a group that she would feel right at home in. Instead she feels more like an outcast she says, "Her soul is black like the inner would of a cave–bone black. Feeling so alone she tries to kill herself by jumping off a cliff, but one of the priest stops her. She begins to see someone about her problem of feeling lonely. He helped her see that her joy and acceptance was to express herself through stories and poems. Then Bell Hooks realizes that all her life she was meant to Get

Women, Writing and Language: Broadening the Definition of Dominance

In her essay entitled Teaching the New Worlds/ New Words, bell hooks focuses on exploring and illuminating the close link between language and oppression from a feminist perspective. Recording that language is a self–imposing kaleidoscope of productive challenges and assistances that is impossible to bond or repress; she suggests that trying to circumscribe, it according to their interest is precisely what oppressors do with it. Hooks adresses African–Americans' relationship to the Standard English as a reality more than a mere case study, and illuminating that how their native language, their most immense mean of bonding to each other had been taken away from them and...show more content...

It can be seen that the poem clearly had an affection of hooks since the two texts have visibly parallel mindsets. In fact, hooks highlights that parallelism by quoting a line from Rich: ''This is the oppressor's language yet I need it to talk to you.''(1) recurrently. hooks expresses that the words of Rich inherently possess the power to demand disobedience to domination through language and they evoke a deep craving to reach out the colonized peoples, to internalize how they suffered, got killed, made languageless, exiled, marginalized. Naturally, Rich does not make this call by a theoretical, dull understanding but through summoning to sympathy, ability to feel the expelled through the imagination derived from being the other: being the other is the catalyst of the unification that awakens the oppressed and make them seize the language, reinvent and utilize it to celebrate their differences; and synchronously, draw in the non–others to a unfamilliar landscape of language. Even though the words of the other would occur to the non–other as alien, the effort on encouraging the majority to walk on the land of the other's knowledge without a claim of mastery or superiority is crucial for a multicultural society to offer life to a broader range of individuals. Also, this sense of learning without a sense of supremacy is one significant

Get more content