Let's Talk: bell hooks' Confronting Class in the Classroom

It was assumed that any student coming from a poor or working-class background would willingly surrender all values and habits of being associated with this background.  Those of us from diverse ethnic/racial backgrounds learned that no aspect of our vernacular culture could be voiced in elite settings.  This was especially the case with vernacular language or a first language that was not English.  To insist on speaking in any manner that did not conform to privileged class ideals and mannerisms placed one always in the position of interloper

Demands that individuals from class backgrounds deemed undesirable surrender all vestiges of their past create psychic turmoil.  We were encouraged, as many students are today, to betray our class origins.  Rewarded if we chose to assimilate, estranged if we chose to maintain those aspects of who we were, some were all too often seen as outsiders.  Some of us rebelled by clinging to exaggerated manners and behavior clearly marked as outside the accepted bourgeois norm.  During my student years, and now as a professor, I see many students from “undesirable” class backgrounds become unable to complete their studies because the contradictions between the behavior necessary to “make it” in the academy and those that allowed them to be comfortable at home, with their families and friends, are just too great.

hooks, bell. "Confronting Class in the Classroom." Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. .

Feel free to comment to this post to talk about this Quote!