evaluating bell hooks: teaching notes

The excerpt from bell hook’s Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom gives us insight into what critical thinking is and how the writer thinks it should and can be applied to improve public education. 

Her personal opinions often seem to contradict her argument for the importance of critical thought because despite advocating for “radical openness” and not “ruling out other people’s perspectives", she keeps a firm stance on what she believes is the correct way of teaching. Her main source of evidence to support her views are mostly anecdotal, her thoughtful analysis coming from her varying experiences in the classroom; from being a child in an “all-black, segregated school in Kentucky”, to a female student in a “predominantly white college” and her experience as an educator and writer. Anecdotes and personal reflections tend to prompt emotional responses, in this case making the reader more sympathetic towards the writer’s encounters with racial discrimination from “teachers who believe that they are racially superior”, consequently making them more likely to agree with hooks’ point of view. On the other hand, I suppose bell hooks has been exposed to all this wisdom and knowledge and opposing ideas that she’s been able to make an informed decision on the ‘right’ approach to teaching so her line of reasoning makes her conclusions perfectly valid since they are consistent with and are based on her own experience. The “utilization of that knowledge to enable you to determine what matters most” is the underlying principle of critical thinking after all.

The way in which she delivers her evidence through anecdotes could also influence the reader to adopt a certain point of view. When she refers to her days as an educator, she sounds quite authoritative: “…it became clear to me, after years in academic settings..” and “..it was clear to audiences that I practiced what I preached”, that if I wasn’t consciously critically analysing her words, I would be inclined to agree with all that she says.

I find that she relies on the use of persuasive and emotive language and quotes from academics with similar thoughts such as Dennis Rader and Daniel WIllingham in order to compensate for her lack of statistics and numerical information. She constantly emphasises the benefits of critical thinking, the activity perpetuating the student's "will to be fully self-actualized", but she offers no accounts of controlled studies that confirms this sentiment to be true for all, her evidence primarily extrapolated from experience. At one point she states that "most children are taught early on that thinking is dangerous", with no concrete evidence to support it, which is a very bold but potentially incorrect generalisation to make. As a result, this makes you question how much you can really trust her line of reasoning and for the reader to derive a conclusion based solely on her perspective is not in the spirit of critical thinking.