From compliance to courage: bell hooks and the politics of teaching to transgress

The idea that classrooms can be radicalspaces-where solidarity, critique, and consciousness take root-was, for me, the most appealing promise of becoming a teacher. I first encountered bell hooks's Teaching to Transgress at the start of my academic career in India, while grappling with a question-how might Sociology be taught to students who have been trained to see ’the social’ either as an abstract entity in need of policy, infrastructure and governance fixes, or as a set of‘problems’ happening to others. The challenge was heightened by hooks's insistence that classrooms could also be spaces of joy, humor, and deep critique-because that, she argued, is what freedom looks like. Why transgress?

Hooks was convinced that transgressions in classroom spaces are a movement against and beyond boundaries-where critique, excitement, and pleasure can co-exist. For her, true learning required students and professors to resist complicity in fear: fear of extra work, fear of risk, or fear of non-compliance when unorthodox teaching methods break away from rigid lesson plans and prescribed course goals.

Hooks emphasized that for classrooms to become spaces of freedom, students are not the only ones burdened with the responsibility of sharing, learning, and growing; rather, it is far more productive when professors bring narratives of their experiences into classroom discussions to illuminate the understanding of academic material. This shared sense of vulnerability, according to hooks, is crucial in building students as conscientious thinkers who are unafraid to live life fully and deeply.

More importantly, a transgressive pedagogical approach exposes the insidious logic underlying neoliberal, market-driven education systems. As such, neoliberalism, as scholars argue, is an economic system marked by increased privatisation, polarisation of wealth, shrinking public institutions, and aggressive individualism. One of the most powerful terms legitimising the corporatisation of universities in the neoliberal regime is the business notion of stakeholders-those who are assumed to have a stake in education. Framed this way, students are positioned as stakeholders, or more precisely, powerful consumers, rather than co-creators of knowledge.

The implications are stark: low student enrolment in a course, or waning interest in an entire discipline, is quickly read as evidence of its irrelevance. Universities operating on stakeholder logics are thus swift to declare disciplines as dead, often leading to their demise or, in more optimistic cases, their merger with numerically buoyant and profitable fields (for example, think of Sociology or History being folded into Psychology). This same logic, however, also strips students of their cultural and critical citizenship. In such systems, student-led protests are not seen as democratic expressions but as disruptions to the market order, and are therefore suppressed, disallowing young people from enacting their democratic rights within a supposedly free country.

Why is this a problem, one may ask? First, it assaults the freedoms of both students and professors who dare to break away from the stakeholder mould. Second, it renders intellectual risk-taking-a hallmark of free, radical thought-a sunk cost, where compliance is rewarded and courage disavowed. It ushers in a misdirected higher education system dominated by education entrepreneurs and corporate-inspired administrators, whose priorities are governed by evidence-based metrics of enrolment and profit. In such cultures, the obsession with approvals-whether for course design, evaluations, or even learning goals-ends up trading genuine academic freedom for corporate efficiency, breeding mistrust and mediocrity.

This is no minor concern. Since private higher education institutions currently make up over 40% of the Indian higher education sector. If the ethical task of questioning inequalities-a responsibility that lies at the heart of several non-profitable disciplines- continues to be undermined, must we conclude that higher education in the country has suffered a frontal blow? The revolutionary road? How might we overcome this travesty? Remembering bell hooks and Paulo Freire-both revolutionary thinkers of pedagogy-offers a path forward. They compel us to move, in both theory and practice, beyond reformist fixes. Instead, they call on students and professors alike to remain politically conscious and vigilant, so that our liberatory dreams are not flattened by market logics and performance metrics. This is not a nostalgic plea to return to some imagined good old days-for there is no such thing.

To be sure, academic jobs in privatised university systems are no longer the comfortable havens of free thought and coffee-house debates. Instead, academic life is increasingly defined by precarious transactions: crushing workloads, the devaluation of teaching in favor of ever-narrower visions of research excellence, tenure and appraisal decisions tethered to student evaluations, the casualisation of labor through low-paid adjunct positions, and an expectation of total allegiance to institutional norms and work practices.
 
How, then, can one practice the liberatory logic of education as freedom within such institutions? Would this not risk turning us into what Sara Ahmed, in her compelling feminist critique of killjoys, calls “willful bad subjects”-those non-compliant figures willing to unsettle other people's (false) happiness by exposing oppressive structures? The answer, I believe, lies in embracing a process that is necessarily slow, messy, and yet urgent.

Since resisting the brute force of neoliberalism in education is not an endpoint but an ongoing, unfinished process, summoning the courage to transgress becomes a necessary starting point. Positioned on the front lines of the classroom, professors are uniquely situated to practice radical pedagogy-through teach-ins, debates, public syllabi, collaborative zines, and even hashtags. But transgression also extends beyond classroom walls: it calls for creating spaces of knowledge production with the wider public, as writers, poets, and innovators, and in the ordinary rhythms of everyday life, in kitchens, clinics, hair salons, and bookstores. And more importantly, bringing unapologetic joy back into the classrooms.

In hooks' radical imagination of the classroom, joy is not an antithesis of discipline and serious scholarship. Rather, it is a step towards liberation. She urged us to place eros at the heart of classroom interactions. This eros is not sexual, but an attentiveness to the body as part of the whole self-voice, tone, touch, posture, glance-valued alongside the mind. To truly imagine classrooms as spaces of freedom, we must move beyond the traditional mind-body dualism and embrace eros as a vital, enlivening force that shapes pedagogical relationships.

It is no easy task. The path to transformative pedagogies will be met with institutional resistance stemming largely from the heavyweight of market-driven logics of education, the tyranny of ranking metrics, and an entrenched tendency to gag critiques of prescribed structures. As the country marked its cherished August 15th with promises and viral tweets, it became more urgent than ever to summon the courage to transgress. To cancel the very possibility of transgression within our universities and classrooms is to wield a weapon of mass subjugation in the hands of suffocating mediocrity. The question is: can we afford such a risk?
 
Author: Prof. Tannistha Samanta, Faculty of Sociology, FLAME University.