Bell Hooks and education
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Learn about Bell Hooks’s perspective on learning and education.
The famous American writer, Mark Twain, declared at one time: “I have never let schooling interfere with my education.” Schools may provide learning through textbooks and homework, but it really is the outside world that teaches people a lot more. In school, for example, there usually is a standard curriculum that students and teachers would follow. Such a curriculum only provides a limited amount of knowledge because no curriculum in the world can encompass all of the knowledge that people can learn. Due to this limitation, people ultimately have to learn about the rest of what the world has to offer from outside a standard classroom environment.
People have to learn life skills from more than just standardized classrooms, they must learn from the rest of the world around them. Furthermore, the rest of the world contains images from mass media that can persuade people to conform to any specific ideas, ideologies, and beliefs that such media projects. This is possible mainly because of the power of advertising. Each and every day, people receive messages from television, film, and media. Mass media ultimately advertises ideas that people can either accept or reject based on their own personal beliefs. Although media may persuade people to conform to certain ideas, it is up to any given individual to decide whether or not to accept such projected ideas when they are bombarded with arguments presented by mass media.
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Finally, because people actually have a choice to either accept or reject ideas that mass media produces, people really do learn more about themselves. If a person makes a choice to believe a specific idea produced by mass media, then such a person understands what he/she agrees with in terms of matters of opinion. Furthermore, being able to either accept ideas from mass media and rejecting those same ideas means that people have a sense of independent thought. Independent thoughts and opinions really are very similar to each other because a person’s entire outlook on the world is based on a matter of thoughts and opinions. When people voice out their opinions by accepting or rejecting ideas that mass media projects, they have their own personal identities. By knowing who they are as people with their own thoughts and opinions, people ultimately learn about themselves. Because of the power of mass media, Bell Hooks can safely assert that popular culture really is “where the learning takes place.”
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