Bell Hooks Teaching To Transgress Analysis

Bell Hooks Teaching to Transgress and Lynn Bloom’s article “Freshman Composition as a Middle-Class Enterprise” both identity the concept of class within education in order to embed the values of a higher class into students of color and of a lower class.
Both Hooks and Bloom analyze the notion of how a student's social class affect their approach and success with academic work when they are being taught by an individual who exerts power and values different than their own into their way of learning. Hooks argues that “class differences are particularly ignored in the classroom” (177), which is mainly because no other class is seen other than the higher class of the teacher. The teacher's social class is what allows him to impose his own class

Hooks says that “those of us from diverse ethnic/racial backgrounds learned that no aspect of our vernacular culture could be voiced in elite setting” (Hooks 182). But, vernacular is what will make students comfortable to share their thoughts in the classroom. It is something taken away from them by the oppressor who wants them to remain silent and never disagree. Hence, why students never want to challenge the ideas of a teacher. Blooms presents a similar argument in which she states “when teachers do address an offensive paper, we maintain our middle class decorum and phrase potentially confrontative comments in language that is tentative, qualified (Bloom 660). She further goes on to say “no matter how informal, slangy, even profane our speech outside of class, teachers and textbooks and college standard concur on the importance of Standard English as the lingua franca for writing in the academy”(Bloom 664). Middle/ higher class teachers are not open to students using vernacular in some ways to express themselves because it strikes them as offensive. Now, students just do things for the sake of doing things, as Hooks refers to this as “tokenism”. Students can never be able to personalize their writing because the two values clash and because of this they are obligated to stay in boundaries. Middle class teachers uses this as an opportunity to penalize students, even if they are correct. Middle class values are often time what shapes the educational system. So, teachers choose to penalize their students because it doesn't meet their own standards. Standards that seem foreign to students because they are obviously not from that social