Every September, we take a week off between the birthdays of bell hooks and Paulo Freire
Not because we think either of them was beyond criticism. Quite the opposite.
hooks was deeply influenced by Freire. His work gave her language for things she was already experiencing and questioning. But she also saw its limitations clearly, particularly its sexism and the way Freire still imagined liberation through a world centred on men.
For hooks, those two things could exist at the same time.
She could value Freire’s work and challenge it. As she put it, “critical interrogation is not the same as dismissal.”
The meeting
People had initially tried to keep hooks away from Freire’s visit to her university because they worried she would disrupt the discussion by raising feminist critiques.
Which, of course, she did. And when people immediately tried to silence her, Freire stepped in.
“Stop, what are you trying to do? You shouldn’t. She’s absolutely right to question. That’s what I am saying in my work.”
In an interview, hooks recalled that, in that moment, he won her heart forever.
Not because he agreed with everything she said. Not because the criticism suddenly disappeared. But because, for her, he became the embodiment of what he claimed to believe about teaching and learning.
He was writing about openness, interrogation and the importance of asking questions. So when hooks turned the difficult question towards him, he did not suddenly change the rules.
It is relatively easy to believe in critical thinking when we are the ones doing the critiquing. It gets a little more interesting when somebody turns the question towards us.
And Freire, at least in this moment, seemed to understand that if difficult questions were good enough for his learners, they had to be good enough for him too.
Dying of thirst
hooks describes coming to Freire’s work “thirsty, dying of thirst”, in the way that a colonised or marginalised person can be thirsty for language, ideas and something that helps make sense of the world they are trying to change. Freire’s work gave her some of that. It nourished her, but it was not clean.
In Teaching to Transgress, hooks describes Freire’s work as water with some dirt in it.. The sexism was the dirt, part of what hooks called a ‘phallocentric paradigm of liberation’, and she never pretended it was not there. She named it, challenged it and pushed Freire on it. But she also refused the idea that finding dirt in the water meant the whole thing had to be poured down the drain.
What I love is that she takes the metaphor further. She talks about people in wealthy countries rejecting tap water because they consider it impure, while having the luxury of buying something cleaner. There is privilege in being able to waste water because it does not meet your standards. It is much easier to demand purity when you are not thirsty.
That makes me wonder how often we do something similar with ideas and with people. How much do we discard because someone has not quite finished the thought, because the language is clumsy, because we disagree with something in it, or because it contains something we need to challenge?
hooks gives us another option. We do not have to ignore the dirt, and we do not have to throw the water away. We can notice what is wrong, name it, work on it, and still allow ourselves to be nourished by what remains.
Wonderfully clunky
Freire, importantly, appears to have done something similar. hooks later said that he had considered rewriting some of his earlier work, but instead chose to respond to the criticism by changing how he wrote and spoke about gender. She points to his later work as evidence of that shift.
Which brings me to one of my favourite Freire quotes that we use in our training:
“…He or she cannot contradict himself or herself in favor of his or her authority, nor in favor of the learners’ freedom: neither authoritarianism nor permissiveness.”
It is wonderfully clunky. He could have written it more elegantly, but I like the clunkiness because you can almost see somebody trying to change how they think, and therefore trying to change how they write. Not perfectly, but visibly.
Maybe that is part of what learning looks like. Sometimes the evidence of learning is not a perfectly polished new position. Sometimes it is an awkward sentence, a changed mind, a better question, or a thought that comes out differently halfway through saying it.
And perhaps we waste something important when we demand that thinking arrives fully filtered before we are willing to engage with it.
That is something we value deeply in Foundation Learning. We are not particularly interested in people arriving or leaving with the right answers. We are much more interested in the question you are still wrestling with, the idea you have not quite found the language for yet, or the thought that changes as other people think alongside you.
Bring us your clunky, half-formed thoughts. We appreciate them .
