This analysis is a product of another seminar class I took, HIS190. It explored traditions of education beyond and in resistance to formal schooling, starting from the late 19th century.
A big chunck of the course was spent questioning and constructing historical narratives through rigorous analysis of primary and secondary sources,
like work by Adrienne Rich, bell hooks, e.t.c.
And so here's one of my analysis tying together my two most favourite work: ‘Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl’ by Harriet Jacobs, and ‘Teaching to Transgress’ by bell hooks:
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs is a powerful autobiography by an enslaved African American woman before the Civil War. Written during the height of the anti-slavery movement, she recounts her life in detail and exposes the physical, psychological, and moral horrors of slavery. Specifically, she focuses on the constant struggle of slaves in a system designed to deprive them of all aspects of freedom: dignity, autonomy, and education.
Usually, Jacobs’s work is read as a narrative of survival and resistance, but my earlier analysis argues that she also makes a deeper claim: the first stage of liberation begins with moral and intellectual awakening, rather than just legal status. Using this thesis as my point of departure, in this essay, I will reanalyze her work through bell hooks’ concept of engaged pedagogy, found in the first chapter of her book Teaching to Transgress.
Bell hooks defines engaged pedagogy as a mode of teaching that “respects and cares for the souls of students”, and insists that learning is when the teacher and student meet as “whole human beings… striving not just for knowledge in books, but knowledge about how to live in the world”. It is important to note that whole, sometimes referred to as holistic in the text, refers to a union of mind, body, and spirit, rather than just the mind. Another recurring theme hooks incorporates is the “connection [between] the will to know with the will to become”. She emphasizes that one must be committed to learning before they can actually learn. So, for hooks, education is more than just conveying literacy, passive consumption, and rote memorization
(a.k.a, the banking system). Instead, it’s a mutual experience between teachers and students that aims to transform the entire self, encourages conscientization (i.e. critical awareness of and engagement with the world) before formal knowledge, and advocates the practice of freedom.
Reading Jacobs’s work through these lenses, we see that enslaved people developed their own forms of engaged pedagogy long before it even had a name: they used awareness and reflection as a response to the system that denied them literacy, the only ‘explicit’ form of education. This enriches my earlier argument by showing that Jacobs is not simply describing education but also, theorizing it. I argue that reading Jacobs’s narrative through bell hooks’ work reveals a new layer to my analysis. While my previous one understood Jacobs’ moral awakening as a beginning of freedom; hooks allows us to understand it as a deliberate and meaningful form of education that enslaved people created for themselves. That is, Jacobs is doing something more ambitious than just seeking freedom: she is theorizing a pedagogical model of freedom.
Jacobs’s narrative demonstrates that she constructs an intellectually clear view of life in spite of the system that tries to prevent her from doing that. The way she describes the world - her reasoning, her emotional clarity, her reflections on right and wrong, all exemplify learning in the form of what bell hooks calls ‘engaged pedagogy’. For example, Jacobs’s awareness and reflection style aligns with hooks’ concept of conscientization. She repeatedly questions how her master, Dr. Flint, a supposedly ‘educated’ free man, could be so morally corrupt. And by doing so, she is fundamentally challenging the banking system of education; rather than merely consuming information, she develops a conscience, just like hooks suggests.
Another example is Jacobs’s “ability to read the characters, and question the motives, of those around” her, before she could even write. This is an instance of pure critical awareness
and an act of resistance. Or in bell hooks’ words, it is her ‘will to know’ connecting to her ‘will to become’ free. Furthermore, Jacobs’s understanding when judging others is a key example of hooks’ idea of holistic education. Hook insists that true education must support the spiritual along with intellectual growth of an individual. And Jacobs clearly portrays that. Like when she is treated cruelly by Mrs. Flint, her mistress, she feels more pity than hatred for her because she sees the mistress’s misery and the causes behind it. This ability to see beyond her own suffering again ties into hooks’ proposed model of education. Thus, we can see Jacobs is precisely using the form of engaged pedagogy hooks theorizes, even before hooks wrote about it.
Yet still, placing Jacobs’s work in discussion with hooks also reveals something that hooks does not fully address. Hooks’ critiques are based on less severe conditions: classrooms, a system that is flawed, but not built on the idea of cruelty. In contrast, Jacobs and other enslaved people had to use the pedagogical model to combat a much more drastic environment: the entire ideology of slavery, which was built to deny their humanity in the first place. They didn’t even have the little degree of autonomy that hooks assumes in her claim. In this system, where a master could tell Jacobs, “I have a right to do as I like with you, - that I can kill you, if I please,” the stakes of education were not academic; they were existential. I believe this difference really matters. It suggests that the pedagogical practices Jacobs describes cannot be contained within hooks’ framework, as her situation was far more serious. So instead of fitting into hooks’ theory, I argue that Jacobs’s narrative forces us to expand the very definition of ‘education’ itself.
Jacobs’s narrative reveals forms of learning that go beyond what bell hooks envisions. For example, while hooks insists that education should nurture the ‘whole human being’, Jacobs shows that enslaved people had to cultivate such wholeness in an environment where they weren’t even treated like humans. The intellectual clarity she develops is not nurtured by
teachers or a shared community of learners; rather, it emerges from navigating threats, resisting manipulation, and protecting her own sense of dignity. Her refusal to be degraded, her ability to understand the motives of those around her, and her understanding of her worth, all while enduring harassment, demonstrates that learning can also be produced through struggle, not only nurtured through dialogue. This is something hooks overlooks in her work. Moreover, while hooks rightly emphasizes the importance of holistic learning in academia, Jacobs shows that enslaved people did it without institutional support - often because they were forced to grow spiritually as an act of resistance (i.e. since knowledge of dignity and morality were the first steps towards freedom, as discussed in my last essay). Thus, Jacobs's narrative emphasizes that when a system is designed to deny one's humanity, the ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ is not just about intellectual fulfillment (as hooks suggests), but it is about the foundational knowledge needed for spiritual persistence against the oppressor. She redefines education as a radical survival mechanism, expanding beyond the typical idea of education as literacy, or bell hook’s idea of education as the practice of freedom.
To conclude, reading Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl through hooks ultimately reshapes both how we read Jacobs’s work and how we understand the very nature of education. It also enhances our ideas of the past, as Jacobs shifts the historical narrative from enslaved people simply learning literacy to showing that they were creating theorized models to resist the oppressive system. Thus, Jacobs reminds us that the true origin of some of the most radical educational theories lies not in classrooms, but were forged in the most oppressive of conditions.
HIS190 was a seminar (small class size) course, and as I mentioned earlier, it explored traditions of education beyond and in resistance to formal schooling, starting from the late 19th century.
We studied the pedagogical innovations and grassroots struggles of anarchic youth, guerrilla intellectuals and feminist revolutionaries who used education broadly, and historical inquiry
in particular, as tools for empowerment and collective liberation.
The main aim of this course was to interrogate the relationship of education to freedom and justice through collective criticism, self-reflection and creative expression.
I honestly took the course because the professor's review on RatemyProf was really good, but I ended up enjoying the course content a lot as well, especially how analytic and unique it was! (in case you're wondering, yes he was an amazing prof, possibly the best I've had at UofT so far).
This course wasn't anything like I'd taken before; it pushed me to rethink education and the education system completely. I never really stopped to think of the interplay of power, biases, hate, and quiet forms of exclusion that shape it. Things in daily life that I would once overlook as “normal,” I could now see them as a product shaped by history, power, and narrative. Like why there are varying concentrations of a certain ethnicity
in the 'successful' category, despite having the same level of education as another.
All in all, I think the most important lesson I learnt was that being a student in this education system is not just about identity, but about responsibility. That it’s not just about who I am becoming, but what forces shape that becoming, and how I might intentionally resist or reshape them.