A Rhetorical Analysis

A rhetorical analysis about bell hooks.

“Confronting Class in the Classroom” by bell hooks, published in 1998, is an essay about the way students learn in the classroom, focusing specifically on middle class values, and their impact within the classroom.  In this essay, hooks explains that students aren’t specifically taught how to act in class, but if they are silent and obey the teacher, they are rewarded, and if they stand up and go against the flow, they are punished.  She explains the differences in people’s reactions with confrontations in the classroom, and how the behavior in the classroom is directly related with social class status.  Hooks is able to use her experiences as a professor and student to convey this message about how learning in the classroom needs to change, otherwise students won’t get a full education, and will be hindered in the real world (177-189).

            Bell hooks has been a professor at colleges, such as Yale University and Oberlin College, and she attended Stanford University as a student.  She has been directly involved with education for a few decades, and has been able to see first-hand how social class status dominates classroom behavior.  She brought up her experience at the very beginning of her college experience and showed that class behavior was just assumed, rather than taught.  “During my college years it was tacitly assumed that we all agreed that class should not be talked about, that there would be no critique of the bourgeois class biases shaping and informing pedagogical process (as well as social etiquette) in the classroom.” (hooks 178).  By describing her personal experience as a student with the social class, and the fact that no one discussed the issues with the current system, it helped prove her point, because she had hands-on experience with the topic. 

            Hooks, as a professor, has seen these bourgeois (middle class) biases take shape also.  “When I entered my first classroom as a college professor and a feminist, I was deeply afraid of using authority in a way that would perpetuate class elitism and other forms of domination.” (hooks 187).  She understood how the classroom was run, and how it had always been run, and later, as a professor, got the chance to change it first-hand.  Later in the same paragraph, she talked about how she “falsely pretended that no power difference existed between students and myself.” 

            One way hooks appealed to her audience’s emotion was by talking about classroom happenings that happen to everyone at some point throughout their education.  She assumed everyone had experienced a student asking a question, and the teacher either asked why it’s relevant, or completely dismissed it.  Hooks was able to relate to that via her graduate classes “…refused the opportunity to speak and ask questions deemed ‘irrelevant’ when instructors didn’t wish to discuss or respond to them.” (hooks 179).  Everyone has experienced this, whether they were the ones it happened to, or they were in the class when it happened to someone else.  That created a very awkward position for the entire class, as it disrupted the flow, and that was how hooks attacked the emotion of the audience.  She brought up the awkward times, and used it to shadow the underlying problem, which was the bourgeois values within the classroom.

She later claimed that it was assumed if one so much as laughed out of place in class, he or she was wrong, and deemed a troublemaker.  Once again, she assumed her audience had been in any given class, where a student laughed at something, or laughed much longer and uncontrollably, and the instructor kicked them out of class, sometimes giving them a referral to the office.  The student didn’t do anything bad, but because he or she disrupted the flow of class, the teacher humiliated the student and deemed him or her a troublemaker.  She attacked the emotion of the audience by making the audience think about whether the humiliation, and possible consequences, of such an innocent act were warranted.  The answer, which she assumed everyone understood, was that no, the humiliation and consequences weren’t warranted, and that was the direct effect of the bourgeois class values.

Hooks opened the essay by explaining that “…we are all encouraged to cross the threshold of the classroom believing we are entering a democratic space �" a free zone where the desire to study and learn makes us all equal.” (hooks 177).  This has been displayed in every elementary through high school classroom, by the cheesy posters on the wall.  They range from “shoot for the moon, if you miss, you’ll land with the stars”, and some educational quote on top of Albert Einstein’s face, insinuating that Einstein voiced said phrase.  She used this logic to show that there was the assumption within schools and schooling that everyone had an equal opportunity in class if they just focused and put their minds to it, ignoring the contradicting idea, which is also shoved into students’ minds throughout school, that they are all special and unique in their own ways, and that no two people are the same.

I feel hooks got her point across loud and clear, and it’s kind of angering.  On some points I agree with her, like the ideas that students “can’t” use freedom of speech in the class, and the judging of students for innocent behavior in the classroom, but I disagree with the idea that it is a middle class issue.  I came from a very wealthy area, and the kids in that area act in a manner that is viewed as stingy and stuck up, by the middle class.  I think by classifying it as a “middle class issue”, rather than a “classroom issue” is where she is wrong, and where a portion of her audience would disagree.  It’s more of an obedience thing than specific social class thing, and if she could just elaborate on that, then I feel the piece would be much better written.

Author's Note

This was an assignment in my college English class from 2014.