Philosophy Imprisoned by Sarah Tyson

Author:Sarah Tyson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-04-14T04:00:00+00:00

This may seem like a wholly “individual” discovery. But it was ultimately from the desire to communicate, the desire to co-participate in the act of speaking, the desire to be recognized, that Malcolm finally became a co-creator in his education and was “saved.” Malcolm’s “salvation” did not come like the voice of God, something wholly external that ultimately turns the “receiver” into a passive and obedient “vessel,” but in and through his active willful engagement with the horizon of others, through books, language, history, and dialogue. The very act of education opens “new worlds” and ruptures the isolation and separation of the alienated individual, the criminal, in and through that expansion of horizons. It is through these encounters with other worlds—both real and imagined—that the “individual” starts to understand his place in his own world as something that is only possible as an active member of a living community. The very structure of pedagogy, then, prevents it from being a journey that is ever done alone. The opposite of isolation and loneliness is education.

This is not to say there are not potential dangers. One of the most disturbing phenomena I have seen in the prison is that, precisely because there are not adequate opportunities for dialogical, “problem-posing” education, “education” only reinforces isolation, paranoia, alienation, and division—between criminal and society, criminal and guard, and criminal and criminal. Perhaps these barriers are insurmountable precisely because they are the walls that allow the institution to stand. The wholly individual “education” leads to conspiracy theories, paranoia, of fitting everything into an already existing a priori narrative. Instead of books and education leading one “out of the cave” of their own solipsistic paradigms, they only serve to reinforce and augment already existing theories. Just as the theory of epicycles was conjured to explain the anomalies of the pre-Copernican universe, so too are different ideas and experiences, however at odds with the existing paradigm, squeezed and squished into the system so that they may fit. This is why the setting of the classroom is so important, most especially a “classroom” that lends itself to discussion, dialogue, what Freire calls “problem-posing” pedagogy. Charles Sanders Peirce emphasizes this in his notion of the “community of inquirers”—it is this very act of co-creating, of dialogue, that is the salve that prevents stagnation, ossification, isolation, alienation, all of which only exacerbates and reinforces their identity as mere individuals and others as criminals. In this way, not only inmate students but teachers (who are also “imprisoned” in certain rigid institutions and canonical structures) are emancipated. In and through the pedagogical encounter teachers and students become self-conscious, free.

Education as dialogue provides the opportunities of an expanded horizon whereby the incarcerated consciousness does not simply retreat and stagnate into an isolated “inner” world, or the various forms of negating the world that are represented by the stoic, the skeptic, or the unhappy consciousness. Active measures must be incorporated that do not reinforce this isolation but encourage and facilitate these encounters with the other.

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