Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom was published by bell hooks in 1994. It is thirty years old and has not aged. If anything, the political context of 2026 — book bans, DEI rollbacks, the ongoing effort to neutralize the classroom — makes hooks' argument more urgent, not less.
The book is a collection of essays drawn from hooks' experience as a Black woman in American academia: as a student, as a professor, and as someone who spent her career insisting that the classroom is a political space whether or not the people in it want to admit it. Her central argument is that education can be either a practice of domination or a practice of freedom — and that choosing freedom requires transgression.
What the Book Is About
hooks opens by naming her earliest experience of school as a site of joy. The all-Black schools she attended before desegregation were, she writes, places where "Black teachers showed us, by example, that learning had no inherent relationship to the color of your skin." Education was explicitly understood as the practice of freedom — preparation for a world that would try to constrain Black lives, met with the deliberate cultivation of mind and spirit.
Desegregation changed that. The integrated school hooks entered was not a site of liberation. It was a site of assimilation — a place where Black children were expected to become legible to white institutional norms, where the curriculum did not reflect their lives, and where the implicit message was that their survival depended on conforming.
From that contrast, hooks draws her framework: education that serves liberation looks fundamentally different from education that serves domestication, even when it operates in the same building with the same stated intentions.
The rest of the book develops what liberatory education requires. Drawing heavily on Paulo Freire — whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed she first read secretly as a young student, hiding it from a teacher who would have disapproved — hooks insists that the classroom must be a community of learners, that the teacher must bring their whole self rather than performing detached authority, that excitement and even difficulty are features of genuine learning rather than problems to be managed, and that healing from the wounds of oppression is not separate from the project of education but essential to it.
She also insists, pointedly, that making the classroom a site of liberation is not comfortable — not for the teacher and not for the students. Transgression is in the title for a reason.
Where It Aligns With Montessori
The alignment between hooks and Montessori is real and deep, but it requires some work to see clearly — because the two bodies of thought arrive at similar places from very different starting points and with very different blind spots.
Both reject what Freire called the banking model. Freire's central metaphor — the student as an empty vessel into which the teacher deposits knowledge — is the shared target. Montessori calls it the traditional education that produces passive, dependent children. hooks calls it domestication. Both argue that the alternative requires trusting learners as active agents, as beings who already have something to bring to the classroom, who learn by doing and engaging and questioning rather than by receiving and repeating.
Both understand the environment as a moral statement. Montessori educators prepare the environment as a deliberate act — the room, the materials, the culture all communicate something about who the child is and what they are capable of. hooks makes the same argument about the classroom more explicitly: every choice the teacher makes about whose voices are included, whose history is on the shelf, whose presence is centered — these are not neutral decisions. They are political ones. The environment either affirms or diminishes the people in it.
Both trust the intrinsic motivation of the learner. hooks writes about the "joy of learning" as something that education systems systematically extinguish — replacing genuine curiosity with performance, compliance, and fear of failure. The three-hour work period, the intrinsically motivated work cycle, the Montessori insistence on following the child's interest rather than the lesson plan — these are all expressions of the same conviction: that learning happens when the conditions for genuine engagement are present, and that manufacturing compliance is not the same thing as teaching.
Both center the whole person. Montessori's understanding of the child is holistic — intellectual, physical, social, spiritual, emotional development as inseparable. hooks is equally insistent that the whole person enters the classroom — that pretending otherwise, that requiring students and teachers to bracket their identities and their wounds at the door, produces a diminished version of education that fails everyone. She writes about the importance of acknowledging that students bring their pain, their history, and their full humanity into the learning space, and that pretending otherwise does not make it untrue.
Where hooks Challenges Montessori
This is the more important section.
hooks would not let Montessori off the hook simply because the method's framework is philosophically compatible with liberation. She would ask harder questions. And she would be right to.
Who is in the room? The prepared environment is only as liberatory as the community it serves. Montessori schools that are predominantly white, predominantly affluent, and that have no accountability to the communities they claim to serve are not practicing liberatory education — they are practicing a gentler version of the same exclusionary system. hooks would note this clearly. The method is not self-executing. The question of who has access to it is a political question, not a logistical one.
Who is the teacher? hooks writes extensively about the way academic institutions enforce a particular kind of teacher identity — detached, authoritative, performing objective expertise — and about how this performance serves the maintenance of existing power relations. She would recognize the version of Montessori training that produces guides who perform calm neutrality, who believe that following the child means never naming the world, who have been taught that bringing their whole selves would be unprofessional. She would not be gentle about this. Guides who have been trained to disappear into the environment are not following hooks. They are performing a kind of authority that looks different but functions similarly.
Neutrality is a political position. This is where hooks and the Peace Rebellion meet most directly. hooks is explicit: there is no neutral classroom. The teacher who does not name racism teaches children that racism is normal. The curriculum that omits certain histories teaches children that those histories do not matter. The school that refuses to take positions on political questions is taking the position that the status quo deserves to be maintained. Montessori peace education that stops at kindness and universal harmony — without naming power, without teaching children to recognize oppression — is not peace education. It is preparation for complicity.
What to Do With This Book
Read it with a highlighter and a journal. hooks writes in a voice that is direct, personal, and sometimes uncomfortable — she is describing her own wounds as often as she is making theoretical arguments, and the combination produces something that reads more like a conversation than a treatise.
Some specific essays worth starting with:
- "Engaged Pedagogy" — her opening argument, the most complete statement of what liberatory education requires of the teacher
- "Paulo Freire" — a tribute and a critique; she loved Freire and was clear-eyed about the limits of his framework for women
- "Eros, Eroticism, and the Pedagogical Process" — on excitement, desire, and the life force of genuine learning; more philosophically interesting than the title suggests
- "Confronting Class in the Classroom" — directly relevant to Montessori communities, which are often class-aspirational in ways that reproduce the hierarchies they claim to challenge
- "Building a Teaching Community: A Dialogue" — a conversation with Ron Scapp that models the kind of intellectual engagement hooks is arguing for
After you read it: bring it to a staff meeting. Not as a curriculum adoption proposal — just as a conversation. Ask your colleagues: Where do we practice what hooks is describing? Where do we not? The discomfort that question produces is the beginning of the work.
Teaching to Transgress is available from most libraries and independent booksellers. Feminist Press is the original publisher. We recommend buying from an independent bookstore — Bookshop.org supports local bookstores nationwide.
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