
Teaching to Transgress
by bell hooks
Break the rules. Bring the kids.
For you if
you're an educator who feels the tension between the institution you work in and the liberation you're supposed to be facilitating
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hooks turns the classroom into a site of rebellion — a place where learning becomes an act of freedom. With fierce tenderness, she calls on teachers to break the obedience of schooling and make education a practice of love, risk, and transgression. It’s the founding text for anyone who believes that learning should set us free, not train us to behave.
Where This Book Lives
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Why it’s here: Makes the most vivid case in documentary form for project-based learning over the standard model — but its history of how American schooling got this way has been disputed by actual education historians, and its producers have their own stake in the reform it's arguing for. Worth watching with that critique alongside it, not instead of it.
Same pattern, different era
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For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
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