Comparison of Freire and hooks

Paulo Freire’s “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education” brings to light an important distinction in the methods of teaching. Rather than a teacher talking to a roomful of listening students and divorcing them from reality, students should be taught in a manner that enforces the fact that they are the reality. Freire relates this to liberation; a revolutionary society may not “inherit these [static teaching] methods from an oppressor society” (73). bell hooks’ in “Toward a Revolutionary Feminist Pedagogy” speaks about the female teachers she had in her early years who taught her how to accept herself and question the way that the world works. In her graduate school years, she was taught to observe and record reality rather than being a part of it. The white supremacist attitude had never been broken in institutions of higher learning and hooks states that “we must relinquish our ties to traditional ways of teaching that reinforce domination” (81).