Whether we're talking about race or gender or class, popular culture is where the pedagogy is, it's where the learning is.
Interpretation
Popular culture serves as a vital platform for education and learning about social issues.
In this quote, Bell Hooks emphasizes the significance of popular culture as a vital medium for understanding complex social issues such as race, gender, and class. She suggests that popular culture is not merely entertainment, but a powerful pedagogical tool that can facilitate learning and provoke critical conversations about societal structures, identities, and injustices.
In practice
In a classroom discussion about social issues, this quote can be used to highlight the importance of incorporating popular culture into the curriculum.
Privilege is not in and of itself bad; what matters is what we do with privilege. I want to live in a world where all women have access to education, and all women can earn PhDβs, if they so desire. Privilege does not have to be negative, but we have to share our resources and take direction about how to use our privilege in ways that empower those who lack it.
Self-love is the foundation of our loving practice. Without it our other efforts to love fail. Giving ourselves love we provide our inner being with the opportunity to have the unconditional love we may have always longed to receive from someone else.
While privacy strengthens all our bonds, secrecy weakens and damages connection. Lerner points out that we do not usually "know the emotional costs of keeping a secret" until the truth is disclosed. Usually, secrecy involves lying. And lying is always the setting for potential betrayal and violation of trust.
When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominator culture.
Once you do away with the idea of people as fixed, static entities, then you see that people can change, and there is hope.
I still think it's important for people to have a sharp, ongoing critique of marriage in patriarchal society β because once you marry within a society that remains patriarchal, no matter how alternative you want to be within your unit, there is still a culture outside you that will impose many, many values on you whether you want them to or not.
Consequently the student who is devoid of talent will derive no more profit from this work than barren soil from a treatise on agriculture.
I think we should stop asking people in their 20s what they 'want to do' and start asking them what they don't want to do. Instead of asking students to 'declare their major' we should ask students to 'list what they will do anything to avoid.' It just makes a lot more sense.
I feel like, in a lot of ways, 'Hidden Figures' is the book that I wrote and have been waiting to read since I learned to read.
Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.
The education of youth, an employment of more consequence than making laws and preaching the gospel, because it lays the foundation on which both law and gospel rest for success.
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