Education, she found was reinforcing domination rather than the empowering experience of her early school years. De-segregation school meant responding and reacting to white folks. Moving from an all-black educational setting to a de-segregated, predominately white College and Graduate school she found that her teachers merely exultated the upper-middle class values and social norms of the white supremist patriarchy (hooks, 1994, p.49). In the quest for a writer's life she quickly realised that this path required her to enter academe, to become a teacher herself. It was where she first learnt to experience learning as revolution (hooks, 1989, 1994).ĭespite the positive experience of her early education hooks was confronted by the constraints of her race, gender and class in what she calls the 'apartheid South'. For her, experiencing the classroom as a place of ecstasy and pleasure was a revolutionary pedagogy that was anti-colonial in practice because it was rooted in antiracist struggle. The teachers were there to guide the students and show them the way to freedom. She learned early that her devotion to learning, to find an authentic voice to a life of the mind was a counter-hegemonic act, a fundamental way to resist every strategy of racist colonialization that existed at the time (hooks, 1994, 2003). Her black women teachers were committed to nurturing intellect so that the students would become scholars, thinkers and cultural workers. The seeds were sown in her primary school years growing up in the American south where she recalls the empowering experience of being educated in an all-black school. Early lifeįrom her early career hooks wanted to become a critical thinker and writer. Her scholarly works on educational practices capsulate her ideas of anti- racist, anti-colonial, multi-cultural and critical and feminist pedagogies ideas that are extremely relevant to social works' desire to teach critical thinking and to foster transformational learning for current and future social workers.

Her influence on black feminist educational politics remains a significant contribution to empowering the education of black students, especially women students facing dual discrimination based on gender and race.

In this article I summarise key educational ideas of a black woman feminist activist - bell hooks.

Bell hooks - bio of black feminist's contribution to critical pedagogy Abstract

Bell hooks and education