Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom

bell hooks (1952-2021) was an American author, educator, and social critic. hooks grew up in Kentucky and was educated in segregated schools. She was influenced by family members and educators who encouraged her to think critically and challenge the status quo, including the patriarchal and racist values that dominated American culture.

In Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom, hooks explains that she went to schools in which the teachers valued critical thinking and higher education. They instilled in her the belief that education was the pathway to liberation and transformation. Despite their influence, hooks writes that it was the inevitable result of white supremacy and dominator culture that she learned to internalize self-hatred. In The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, hooks describes her childhood and the ways in which her parents unwittingly upheld patriarchal values. She looked forward to attending university and meeting others who valued intellectualism and critical thinking.

At Stanford University, hooks was struck by the contrast of her professors and the teachers of her childhood who emphasized education as a practice of freedom. Her professors dehumanized their students and upheld structures of white supremacy and patriarchy. Those few educators who used counter-hegemonic pedagogy inspired her to deconstruct and challenge patriarchal and racist biases. However, it was her professors who demeaned and dehumanized hooks and her intellectual works who inspired her to develop a pedagogy that would empower students to achieve self-actualization. hooks obtained a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1973 from Stanford University and a Master of Arts in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1976. Her first teaching position was as a senior lecturer in ethnic studies at the University of Southern California. After completing a doctorate in English from the University of California in 1983, she continued her award-winning teaching and writing career.

hooks received the American Book Award in 1991 for Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. In 2020, hooks was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Women of the Year. hooks changed her name from Gloria Jean Watkins to pay homage to her maternal great-grandmother. The intentional lower casing of her name was intended to symbolize the importance of her work rather than her celebrity. After teaching at Yale, City College of New York, San Francisco State University, the University of California, and other esteemed institutions, hooks returned to Kentucky to take a position at Berea College where the bell hooks Institute was later founded.

At first, hooks became a teacher to support her work as a writer, but she quickly fell in love with the profession and described it as one of her most rewarding endeavors. hooks was a prolific writer, publishing more than forty works in a variety of genres, including essays and poetry. One of her major influences was Sojourner Truth, whose speech “Ain’t I a Woman” served as the title for hooks’s first major text, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Her works explore the intersectionality of race, sex, class, and culture. She published several works on teaching and education, including two works that precede Teaching Critical Thinking—Teaching to Transgress and Teaching Community. hooks believed that education was the key to transforming a culture and the front line for enacting social justice.