Analysis Of Bell Hooks Keeping Close To Home

Sitting in a classroom, listening to lectures and taking notes, is what many would think of when discussing the topic of education. There is, however, so much more to the concept of “education”. It goes beyond gaining knowledge and information and effects who one is as a person. Drawing from different articles written on education, there are varied perspectives on what it truly means to gain an education. An education is an invitation, an open door into new perspectives on life and one’s place within it. In an article written by Adrienne Rich, an education is not something to receive but something one should “claim”. Rich puts it as “you cannot afford to think of being here to receive an education; you will do much better to think of yourselves
In “Keeping Close to Home: Class and Education” by Bell Hooks, Hooks describes the wedge that can be placed between those who have received an education and those who have not. Coming from a lower class background there was much hesitation around Hooks gaining a higher education which may come as a surprise to some, but families often worry that children gaining more access to world views and ideas might not return to their more humble beginnings. There is an idea that learning and being exposed to more formal education actually changes a person for who they are, which results in a widening gap between said person and perhaps their family. In the article Hooks discusses a perspective somewhat similar to that of Rich, “ even though I received an education designed to provide me with a bourgeois sensibility , passive acquiescence was not my only option. I knew that I could resist. I could rebel. I could shape the direction and focus of the various forms of knowledge available to me.”Hooks. There is the idea that one is in control of how their education shapes them as a human being. Hooks discusses that there was an option to be passive and let the education she was given mold her and conform her, or to take hold of what is being given
Plato expands on the idea by writing, “if this is true, our view of these matters must be this, that education is not in reality what some people proclaim it to be in their professions. What they aver is that they can put true knowledge into a soul that does not possess it, as if they were inserting vision into blind eyes.” Plato. To place knowledge into a soul that does not possess it is in essence giving an education to an individual who receives it passively and does not, as Rich puts, “claim” it. Plato elaborates that to accept education as a thing of intake and not allow it to affect oneself to the deepest core of the soul is as useless as putting vision in blind eyes. Similarly to the past two articles, there is an element that when allowed, or when one accepts the invitation, education can transform your identity, even down to your soul. Another statement from the Cave that expresses the complete transformation that can occur through education is, “the true analogy for this indwelling power in the soul and the instrument whereby each of us apprehends is that of an eye that could not be converted to the light from the darkness except by turning the whole body.” Plato. This idea that one must turn the whole body in order for the eye to be converted is the same that in order to truly indulge and take ownership of