In the beginning of “Teaching to Transgress” hooks describes her transition from a black-only school to a white school. She describes this as a time in which her love for education was stripped away, “Knowledge was suddenly about information only. It had no relation to how one lived, behaved”(3). In an attempt to systemize education, we have stripped children’s intellect from the rest of them. Children are consistently “taught… to believe a classroom [is] diminished if students and professors regarded one another as “whole” human beings”, but in honing in solely on intellect and neglecting other needs children are left confused and vulnerable about “how to live in the world”(14).
In “Writing Is an Expression of Embodied Cognition” Bazerman and Tinberg demonstrate how innately linked writing is with our psyche. Yet, we commonly leave this tendency unnurtured in our modern education scape. Writing is commonly perceived as a forced activity in which students must synthesize works in a way that “meets the standards”. Students are regularly asked to create meaning where they see none and neglect the true meaning that may come through had they been encouraged to utilize writing as a skill rather than a tool.
In our current systems we are not accessing “the full, human dimension of both readers and writers in the construction of meaning”, we are asking students to isolate and regurgitate knowledge, and then synthesize it (Bazerman and Tinberg). Synthesis comes with a sense of voice. It comes with the ability to re-read and think about what you wrote. In our modern pedagogy, based in the rhetorical process- modeled off of an oratory art, we are not encouraging the natural progression and inclination our mind has toward synthesis. Both hooks and Nancy Sommers reflect this sense of writing and education as self-discovery. This sentiment that “Good writing disturbs: it creates dissonance. Students need to seed the dissonance of discovery” is equally available at the beginning of hooks book, yet perhaps more of an onus on the system than the student (10).
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