Hooks and Class ~ Post 10

"During my college yeas, it was tacitly assumed that we all agreed that class should not be talked about" (Hooks, Google Books p110).

     This quotation from Hooks' chapter 14 is going to be the focus of my blog this week. In reality, I could focus on the entirety of the following paragraph, but I'll try to restrict it to just this statement. The primary reason for this is that I feel that this quotation really shows the dated nature of Hooks' work. I believe this statement had merit when it was written, and to a lesser extent today. But the fact of the matter is Bell Hooks' college years were around the 1970s, a vastly different educational landscape in comparison to that which we have today. As such, I believe her ideas and thoughts in this area are wrong: class is absolutely something that should, and is, talked about in classes today.

     I am a fourth year education student, moving into teacher's college very soon. As such, I've essentially been through the ringer as far as modern educational courses are concerned. I cannot count how many times we have discussed the socioeconomic background of students, as well as teachers, and how this can take a role within the classroom. Its something that I'm extremely familiar with, to the point that not discussing it goes against a classroom norm. I'd be hard pressed to find an example of a class in which it wasn't brought up at least one time. This is something I consider to be a very good thing. Through Hooks' depiction of her past experiences, a rather vivid picture of teacher's education in the past is painted; it is not a place I would have wanted to be. They were heavily encouraged to stick with the factory style of education: keep the status quo, everyone aims for the same goal and no one branches out or alters the norm. Today, I feel like that context is finally beginning to change. It seems to me that from the beginning of my education, we've consistently been told that our system is, in essence, broken and needs to be fixed. The fact of the matter is, we are the next generation of teachers, and we're bring encouraged to make change. An entire generation of learners entering the teaching force who have had the ideals of class, race, ethnicity; all of these different ideas are something that have been instilled in us as future educators, and I think this speaks well to our system.

     Is this already being done in the actual classroom? That's hard for me to say. For the past four years I've largely been restricted to the university classroom, which is a progressive environment in its nature. Will this translate into the real world? Who knows. I would certainly like it to. However, my core point is that, at least within the context of a university level classroom, the environment has changed from the way Hooks has described it. We're improving, and becoming progressive. The future looks good, and I can't wait to be a part of it.