The inmates I teach are serious, disciplined, hard-working students, eager to engage with ideas<\/em>.<\/p>\nNever have I been more grateful to teach where I do: at a men\u2019s maximum-security prison. My students there, enrolled in a for-credit college program, provide a sharp contrast with contemporary undergraduates. These men are highly motivated and hard-working. They tend to read each assignment two or three times before coming to class and take notes as well. Some of them have been incarcerated for 20 or 30 years and have been reading books all that time. They would hold their own in any graduate seminar. That they have had rough experiences out in the real world means they are less liable to fall prey to facile ideologies. A large proportion of them are black and Latino, and while they may not like David Hume\u2019s or Thomas Jefferson\u2019s ideas on race, they want to read those authors anyway. They want, in short, to be a part of the centuries-long conversation that makes up our civilization. The classes are often the most interesting part of these men\u2019s prison lives. In some cases, they are the only interesting part.<\/p>\n
Best of all from my selfish point of view as an educator, these students have no access to cellphones or the internet. Cyber-cheating, even assuming they wanted to indulge in it, is impossible. But more important, they have retained their attention spans, while those of modern college students have been destroyed by their dependence on smartphones. My friends who teach at Harvard tell me administrators have advised them to change topics or activities several times in each class meeting because the students simply can\u2019t focus for that long.<\/p>\n
If prison inmates, many of whom have committed violent crimes, can pay close attention for a couple of hours, put aside their political and personal differences, support one another\u2019s academic efforts, write eloquent essays without the aid of technology and get through a school year without cheating, is it too much to ask university students to do the same?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Most of them, yes. They won\u2019t, because they can\u2019t. <\/em>Never having been subject to much in the way of self-discipline or respect for any sort of authority, up to and including parental; possessed of little to no interest in actual<\/em> education or self-betterment; born, weaned, and raised sucking down the bitter milk of self-indulgence, unearned praise, overentitlement, and low expectations\u2014it is indeed too much to ask. They have been spared the rod, yielding the results predicted by the old biblical homily. That shouldn\u2019t come as any big surprise, to any parent worthy of the name.<\/p>\n(Via VP<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Endorsed, wholeheartedly. College Should Be More Like PrisonThe inmates I teach are serious, disciplined, hard-working students, eager to engage with ideas. Never have I been more grateful to teach where I do: at a men\u2019s maximum-security prison. My students there, enrolled in a for-credit college…<\/p>\n
Would you like to know more? How to fix it<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,16,48,61,89,122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-begins-at-home","category-believe-it-or-else","category-flotsam-andor-jetsam","category-hmmm","category-read-and-heed","category-where-do-we-go-from-here","wpcat-15-id","wpcat-16-id","wpcat-48-id","wpcat-61-id","wpcat-89-id","wpcat-122-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldfury.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldfury.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldfury.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldfury.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldfury.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10411"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/coldfury.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10411\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10412,"href":"https:\/\/coldfury.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10411\/revisions\/10412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldfury.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldfury.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldfury.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}