As a philosophy professor who has taught the “classics” every semester for almost three decades, and who has taught them in prison as well, I cannot celebrate and be thankful enough for this very well executed book. This book will be eye opening and informative to those who teach “the” classics across a variety of institutions, contexts, and levels. It will also be informative to those who have or want to teach in prisons or programs for “returning citizens” or “citizens in transition.” The book is full of pedagogical reflections, resources, and evaluations that without question will be extremely useful even to those not teaching in prisons. Further, the pedagogical import of this book reaches beyond the specific context, namely “prison education,” because it is also a profound meditation on humanistic pedagogy as such, i.e. what is it that we aim to do as teachers of the “humanities.”
This is an edited volume made up of eleven chapters; the chapters are relatively short but that pack an intellectual and vocational punch. It is evident the editors went for substance and content, rather than length or word counts. The introduction by the editors is a superb overview of the aims, structure, and challenges of the book. The book has three sections. The first section gathers chapters that emerged from traditional, i.e. in person teaching in prisons that was sponsored by private institutions or underwritten by community projects and foundations. This is the longer section. The first chapter by Emily Allen-Hornblower opens with a visit to Rikers Island for a performance and reading of Euripides The Trojan Women in prison. Then it turns to the author’s experience of teaching mostly Greek drama and epics in prison, focusing on the role of the emotions: grief, anger, and indignation. The second chapter by Elizabeth Bobrick discusses the relevance of honor as it is presented in Greek drama, and how it enable her prison students to see their own tragic situation through the lens of their own loss and quest for honor. The third chapter is a dialogue between Nancy Felson and Nebojša Todorović on teaching “Masculinities in Ancient Greek Literature: From Achilles to Socrates.” The fourth by Amy E. Johnson and Laura M. Slatkin covers two semesters of teaching in prison, the first that focused exclusively on Homer and the second on fifth century Athenian tragedy. In the second semester they taught Sophocles’s Ajax in conjunction with Ellen McLaughlin’s Ajax in Iraq, which re-enacts Sophocles tragedy in the contemporary American context and the wars in the Middle East. The authors discuss the challenges of teaching in prison, where they found a vast range of academic skills, or lack thereof. The fifth chapter by Alexandra Pappas deals with the Medea Project that brings the performance of Greek drama to women’s correctional facilities. Pappas was also able to teach a course titled “Ancient Greek and Roman Mythology: Power, Gender, Voice,” which was approved to count as an advanced English credit for the GED. In this class, she covered some of the following persona: Hera, Athena, Aphrodite, Artemis, Demeter, Dionysius, Plato, Tiresias, Danaë, Antigone, Cassandra, and Helen of Troy. The sixth by Stephen Scully is a wider reflection on the relationship between family violence and social order as read through the work of Babylonian creation myth Emma elish, Hesiod, Genesis, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Homer, and Freud. Scully also discusses the logistic of getting in and out prison and the challenges this entails.
The second section of the book gathers chapters that deal with non-traditional forms of teaching, in this case, theater performances and “correspondences” courses. This section has two chapters, but they are extremely informative and moving. Chapter seven by Nicole Dib and Olga Faccani, which discusses their experience teaching Ovid’s “Baucis and Philemon,” challenges us to think about the role of sexual violence in the “classics,” and how we have to be supremely alert not only to how the status of a text that is about sexual violence may condone, celebrate, and even re-enact that violence on students, whether incarcerated or not. Chapter eight, by Michael Morgan and Zachary Price, is framed as a conversation between two teachers who were participants in The Odyssey Project, which enacted dramatic performances of the Odyssey and post-production discussions. This chapter was particularly moving, and in many ways, answers questions raised in the third part of the volume.
In the third part, “Critical pedagogy and the academy,” there are three chapters that take a distant and critical approach to teaching the “classics” in both prison and post-prison, or re-entry, contexts. The ninth chapter by Dan-el Padilla Peralta offers a reflection on the responsibility of the academy towards formerly incarcerated citizens who face the challenges of re-entry. The tenth, by Elena Dugan and Mathura Umachandran, covers a mixed mode of instruction that involved teaching in a maximum security prison in New Jersey in parallel with students at an elite educations institution. The syllabus was focused on Greek and Roman mythology and their representations of misogyny and sexualized violence. The eleventh, by Jessica Wright, is also a critical reflection on the role of prison pedagogy as an extension of the “carceral state.” This last chapter, in fact, was a meta-reflection on what teaching in prisons can and should do so that it is not just a perpetuation of the prison-industrial complex. These last chapters raise very important questions that go beyond these immediate contexts. As a student in one of the courses discussed in this section asks: “Isn’t this all white man’s mythology?” (113). One could go further, as the editors explain:, the teaching of the classics across the curriculum has been “wielded as tools of exclusion or used to promote colonialists projects” (6).
Overall, the structure and contents of the book is very successful and forces us to think about issues such us: which classics and why, how do we teach them, why are they relevant today, and across history, and how do we reflect on how they have been constitutive, albeit polemical, in the construction of “whiteness,” or of a mythology that has subtended Euro-American colonial and imperial projects, which have in turned informed and legitimated U.S. homegrown white racial supremacy—which is without question a major catalyst for our exceptional prison-industrial complex? In the remainder of this review, I will try to do justice to the heart of this book by focusing on three basic questions raised collectively by all the authors: first, why teach the classics as an element or component of a humanistic education in prisons; second, what the challenges of teaching the “classics” in prison, which are teaching challenges tout court, tell us about education in contemporary society? Then, to close, I want to focus on the question of whether teaching the “classics” is a way of teaching Euro-American colonialism and white supremacy, by way of a reflection on my own teaching experiences while teaching in prison.
Education was a privileged of white men who owned property, which included slaves and their wives, until the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century. With the French, U.S., and Haitian revolutions, a new order emerged in which citizens would be self-legislating, and not mere subjects of a Crown. To be self-legislating, as democratic citizens, requires education: no self-ruling without the epistemic resources to enable informed and principled decisions. Constitutional democracies raised the Greek ideal of paideia to a new level: every citizen can and must be a Socrates. No democratic legitimacy without democratic education: every citizen a rational legislator. Of course, this is the ideal, if only in writing, and certainly betrayed all along the tortured histories of constitutional democracies. Here we only have to mention that slaves were not to be educated, and when they became free peoples, and citizens, they were relegated to the status of second-class citizens worthy only of their “separate education.” This is a crooked, sad, and shameful history. Yet, a norm and principle were established: education for democracy would have as one of its pillars “humanistic” education. The core of this education is moral and civic autonomy. One can’t be a self-legislating citizen without moral autonomy, and civic autonomy is the germinal of democratic self-legislation.
At the heart of humanistic education, however, there is another goal: that we acquire a moral, cultural, and civic identity that links us to what has been called our historical and human conversation. This is where the classics enter into this “conversation of humanity across time.” The “classics” have been the arch that has sustained that conversation across centuries, and that conversation has been contentious and always full of affirmation, dissent, and rejection. Hannah Arendt claims that “tradition” is what survives this kind of contention, evaluation, disavowal, and then transmission. We are participants in the conversation that is always handing down and transforming tradition.
Now, who, and not what, are so-called inmates or prisoners? One of the virtues of this book is that it raises the question about the semantics of how we ought to refer to them. In fact, inmates are citizens in the process of exit from, reentry, and in transition, back into our polity. As the editors point out, the U.S. makes up 4% of the world population, while we have 25% of the world prison population, at an annual cost of 80 billion dollars. These statistics, however, become more revealing when we look at the racial and ethnic make up of these populations. They become even more stark and gruesome when we factor in the inter-generational character of our exceptional institution of mass incarceration, i.e. three or four generations of family members who have been branded by our prison system. The question remains: why teach Homer, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, etc? The essays in the first part of this book allows us to offer at least three answers, although there are more: these texts create a temporal and cultural distance that allows students to see their own existential questions from a afar; second, they exhibit a plethora of challenges, dramas, questions, quandaries, tragedies, perseverance and endurance that allows us, and them, to connect to the “human experience”; and third, they enabled students to acquire the language, symbols, allegories, metaphors, and narratives that allows them to participate in a conversation about who we have been, have become, may become.
Another virtue of this book is its frank discussion of the challenges of prison education. The editors, and contributors, are aware that the rise of the prison industrial complex was accompanied be the withdrawal of educational opportunities within what where originally and primarily considered to be institutions of reformation and redemption. Some prison education programs are run and financed by private educational institutions; others, by public funded community programs; others are entirely voluntary. It should be noted that this volume is made up of contributions stemming mostly, if not exclusively, from the Northeast and California. I do not attribute this to the provincialism of the editors, but to the telling fact about the geography of regimes of penality in the US. There are many kinds of prisons: detention centers, minimum, maximum-security prisons, juvenile, women’s and man’s prisons, and of course ICE detention centers. They all present educational challenges: whether, how, when can you access them; and if you can, what can you provide your students. There is the perpetual challenge of the unforeseeable lock-downs, and that inmates are always at the beck and call of the prison authorities; there is the challenge of what can be brought or used in a class room; and of course, what resources students in prisons have access to: i.e. pens, paper, pens, computers, books, etc. Finally, there is the challenge of where are these prisons (urban, rural, semirural) and how, you as a teacher, make it there, and how much time, both your students and yourself, have to spend going through the multiple checks, doors, corridors, call out, etc. There is another challenge that is discussed in this book that is important to note, and that is that when you may be teaching in one of these multiple prison facilities, you will invariably encounter very diverse levels of educational preparedness. In many ways, this is not dissimilar from teaching at a major public university, where you have students who clearly need remedial education, and students who have attended superior high schools that have prepared them very well. Prisons are microcosms of our society. They replicate our worst vices, but also exhibit our best virtues.
To close, I turn to the question posed by this book that I found most challenging. It comes in chapter ten, in which the authors acknowledge that: “Classics has held esteemed place in humanistic projects that emphasize the emancipatory value of education. By this logic, it should follow that an incarcerated classroom is an ideal venue to give people the chance to develop tools for greater human understanding by studying Classical Mythology” (119, my italics). Yet, and the authors continue: “…our experiences have shown us that Classics do not neatly line up with a pedagogical praxis of liberation…We replicated part of exclusionary and supremacist structures of knowledge and experience despite our attempts at crafting a comparative and inclusive curriculum” (119). I want to approach this question by way of a brief discussion of my own experience teaching in prison. In collaboration with a colleague in the college of education, and with support of the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State University, we launched the “Restorative Justice Initiative.” Our first goal was to bring a diversity of curriculum to the local prisons: arts, writing, and of course, the Classics. As part of the last goal, I developed a course called “The Quest of the Hero.” I taught the course for three semesters. For the first semester, I picked the texts; as we went along, the students picked the texts for the subsequent classes. We read, in their entirety, the Gilgamesh, the Oedipus Cycle, the Odyssey, the four dialogues on Socrates’s trial and execution; then we read Dante’s Divine Comedy, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and other “classic” texts. Our classes began with students reading sections from their weekly reflections that I had highlighted that I thought were insightful, eloquent, well written, or foreground something that was an unsuspecting aspect of the text. They read them out loud and then we discussed them. The reflections would be one to two pages and because they did not have access to computers were hand written (although there were some who seemed to have access to computers and a printer). One of the end of the semester projects was: write your own hero narrative, make a mythology, you may draw on your experience. Another was, write an epic (a la Dante or the Iliad), with one of your colleagues in this class or your cell bloc, and tell us whether you are ready to perform it.
As someone who has taught the classics for nearly three decades, I also know that we, in most cases English-only speakers, do not have a direct access to these texts. We always read them in translation. Thus, I always brought two or three extant translations of the key passages. We would evaluate their merits in terms of language, meaning, lyricisms, accuracy, and comprehensibility. Two things that were important for me, and to them, is that they could hear their voice as readers, interpreters, and philosophers; and second, that they saw themselves as engaging in this long conversation on what it means to be human, regardless whether the gods, fate, society, or our bad judgment has confined us to a prison. For me, to teach in prison, was about being there as a witness to their dignity, not because I would grant it, but because they have their dignity regardless, and because as an educator, in a democracy and for a democracy, I think it is my moral and civic duty to teach where I am most needed. But, the question remains, and to paraphrase, isn’t teaching the classics teaching “white man’s mythology” and Euro-American racial supremacy? Here, we are fortunate that a whole generation of classicists have been taking up this question. One of their important revelations is that the Classics have been also the site for the articulation of liberatory anti-colonial narrative and vistas. The classics are classics because they were there before Europe, the United States, Euro-Anglocentricisms, colonialism, and of course, white supremacy. They may help us overcome these viral maladies, or at the very least give us the language and narratives by means of which we can be awakened to our common humanity and our common dreams of liberation and self-fulfillment.
Table of Contents
Introduction, Emilio Capettini and Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz
PART I: Old texts, new classrooms
1. Reading the emotions inside and outside: classical Greek texts in prison and beyond, Emily Allen-Hornblower
2. “Because we’ve done bad things”: understanding timē in prison, Elizabeth Bobrick,
3. Dialogic pedagogy as a model for teaching classics in prison, Nancy Felson and Nebojša Todorović
4. Surmises and surprises: notes on teaching ancient Greek literature in a correctional facility
Amy E. Johnson and Laura M. Slatkin
5. Inside out: classical myth in a county jail, Alexandra Pappas
6. From family violence to civic order: ancient myths and modern theory in a medium-security prison, Stephen Scully
PART II: Beyond the classroom
7. Teaching Ovid to incarcerated students: an experiential analysis, Nicole Dib and Olga Faccani
8. A poetics of performance liberation: a conversation about The Odyssey Project, Michael Morgan and Zachary Price
PART III: Critical pedagogy and the academy
9. Returning citizens and the responsibilities of the academy: teaching for Columbia university’s justice-in-education initiative, Dan-el Padilla Peralta
10. Racing and gendering classical mythology in the incarcerated classroom, Elena Dugan and Mathura Umachandran
11. Critical perspectives on prison pedagogy and classics, Jessica Wright