All posts tagged: classroom

I taught art in a high-security prison – Waiting for the Out took me straight back to my classroom

I taught art in a high-security prison – Waiting for the Out took me straight back to my classroom

Published by skeptic

Watching Waiting for the Out, the BBC’s flagship new drama series, transported me straight back to my classroom in HMP Wakefield in the mid-1990s. This decaying Victorian building at the heart of a challenged city in the north of England is one of the UK’s ten category-A, high-security prisons for men. Many inmates are on life or whole-life sentences. I was a naive, young graduate from Yorkshire with limited teaching experience, no teaching qualification and certainly no knowledge of prison education. I was looking to fund my part-time PhD – a qualification that was becoming the prerequisite for employment in universities. Teaching art and the humanities at HMP Wakefield changed my life, making me the educator and campaigner I am today. As the publicity for Waiting for the Out says: “Freedom isn’t always on the outside.” This refers to the mental health challenges of the main character, Dan (Josh Finan), a philosophy teacher in a category-B prison somewhere in London, and also his students (men both outside and inside the prison walls). But it also …

The Limits of “Indoctrination” Talk

The Limits of “Indoctrination” Talk

Published by Jenni Sidey

Many recent debates about education have focused on the idea of indoctrination. The following dialectic is by now familiar: someone points to a concept, book, or topic they find objectionable and calls it “indoctrination.” Those who approve of that part of the curriculum defend it by arguing that it is, in fact, not indoctrinating students. In most cases, the debate reaches a stalemate, with both sides convinced that the other party is ideologically motivated and untrustworthy. At this point, those with the power to decide what “indoctrination” amounts to—be it school, district, state officials, or, in a few cases, even the Supreme Court—issue a verdict and enforce compliance. A natural response to this dynamic would be to say that the parties involved are not accurately tracking indoctrination. They are merely pointing to educational content that they personally find disagreeable, distasteful, or ideologically unappealing. Indoctrination is a real phenomenon, but our political conflicts have hindered our ability to identify and criticize it. Here is one potential solution: come up with principled (objective, neutral, unbiased, etc.) criteria …