Everyone wants to know more about love. We want to know what it means to love, what we can do in our everyday lives to love and be loved. We want to know how to seduce those among us who remain wedded to lovelessness and open the door to their hearts to let love enter. The strength of our desire does not change the power of our cultural uncertainty. Everywhere we learn that love is important, and yet we are bombarded by its failure.
bell hooks introductory chapter on love and belonging was a self reflective read. Out of all the readings that we were given it was the most simplistic in terms of language, prose and content, but it was also the most powerful. hooks talks about her past experiences from childhood to adulthood, finding a place of love and belonging. There was something so valuable about her openness, her brutal honesty, and vulnerability. hooks writes about her relationship with, and to love, yearning to find the love and belonging that she once had as a child and making the same connections as an adult. I think that what I took away from the reading is heightened in The Virtues of unfulfillment: Dethinking Eros and Education in Plato’s Symposium by Chen – Ya Sun , in the six speeches Plato wants us to realize that it’s not so much physical love but agapeic love that can only be fulfilled epistemologically. hooks makes the point that it’s easier to be loved as a child because immaturity, as well as lack of self-experience and unmeasured self-expression, is commonplace in terms of being tactile. How we respond and curb this sense of freedom in how we express ourselves takes form and really imprints on how we love, choose to love within all aspects of our daily lives. I think that in all about love- hooks teaches us that there is something that can be learned that can be mirrored in the classroom; in how we respond and relate to our students.
“Only love can heal the wounds of the past. However, the intensity of our woundedness often leads to a closing of the heart, making it impossible for us to give or receive the love that is given to us. To open our hearts more fully to love’s power and grace we must dare to acknowledge how little we know of love in both theory and practice”
I thought that within the teaching context that she spoke to rather dramatically the in the child in all of us, as both the teacher and the student, a in the way we still want to make those connections. hooks wants us to feel that we can in nature be like a child and this leads to less of a parochial understanding of love. Relationships in life, and more so demonstrably in the classroom as well as social justice can be a place of openness and learning, where the relationship is reciprocal and both parties can find that paternalistic/ maternalistic way of connecting without infantilising the relationship. Regardless of where we are within the academic environment, we all want the same thing love, care and belonging which finds itself aligned with and leads to the
The four platonic Virtues:
- Wisdom
- Courage
- Moderation
- Justice
“We still accept that the family is the primary school for love. Those of us who do not learn how to love among family are expected to experience love in romantic relationships. However, this love often eludes us. And we spend a lifetime undoing the damage caused by cruelty, neglect, and all manner of lovelessness experienced in our families of origin and in relationships where we simply did not know what to do”.
The reading for me made an immersive impression on how we can try to be more emphatic as teachers because we only can see the veneer of what is presented before us. There may be issues of belonging, abandonment, that seeps beneath the surface, and having that openness will allow the students to feel that they can become vulnerable and in turn, we can learn how to be more accepting.
Bibliography
- b. hooks, all about love: new visions, published in 2000 by William Morrow and Company, Inc.