This paper discusses bell hooks' book of 15 short essays, "Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom," which gathers hooks's central beliefs about the political purposes of higher education. The paper describes hooks' own lack of models for the kind of classroom she wished to create as a young teacher and her initial experimentation with and student resistance to that which was untraditional. The book explores the specific nature of her engaged (transformatory/liberatory/radical) pedagogy and its particular demands upon instructors and students. It suggests the joys of learning in such a freed environment. Three components of hooks' educational philosophy are (1) education as resistance (teaching and learning as revolutionary acts); (2) engaged pedagogy (which sees classrooms as arenas for exploration and mutual participation and which requires knowledge of individual students, different cultural ways of knowing, and self-actualization); and (3) learning as joy and ecstatic transformation. Weaknesses in hooks' educational philosophy include not specifying important issues (e.g., seldom offering detailed examples of such things as classroom exchanges or curricular choices) and never specifically stating what she feels students who have partaken of engaged pedagogy will be able to do that traditionally trained students cannot. (SM)