education | Class Blog

The Importance of Prison Libraries

February 19 2021February 19, 2021

“The United States is not a country with a prison system, but a prison system with a country”

We as a nation currently live in the age of mass incarceration, our prisons overflow with prisoners and teens are funneled from schools into prisons (to such an extent that high school graduation rates are measurably affected). Said school-prison nexus is so prolific and problematic that it has been given a specific label — the “school-to-prison pipeline” — and been made the subject of numerous academic studies.

Newspaper comic which features a child being put into the prison system over low-level offenders.

School-to-prison Pipeline Comic

Thankfully within these overpopulated prison systems exists a trojan horse of sorts which helps victims of this pipeline escape from its long-term effects — the prison library.

Malcom X in his paper Learning to Read discusses how a major component in his transformation from a poorly educated street hustler to articulate leader for Black America was his access to his prison’s library during a seven year long prison sentence. In order to initially improve his reading and writing literacies, he took the route of learning the fundamentals through reading and copying a dictionary (sourced from his prison’s library) from front to back. He states that after teaching himself said fundamentals that for the rest of prison sentence that “in every free moment [he] had, if [he] was not reading in the library, [he] was reading on [his] bunk.”

The results of this self-education process speaks for itself through the renown he still holds for how he progressed the Civil Rights Movement through his effective speeches and intelligent writings.

Malcom X

Merging Malcom X’s experience with Maisha T. Winn and Nadia Behizadeh’s paper The Right to Be Literate: Literacy, Education, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline reveals the importance of prison libraries in the reduction of the school-to-prison pipeline’s negative long-term effects. In that, Winn and Behizadeh’s work concludes that the development of critical literacy in youths is of major importance in helping them escape from being sucked up by the pipeline. Thus, drawing from both Winn and Malcom X, it seems intuitive to equally declare that the development of critical literacy after one was unable to break free of the school-prison nexus earlier in life still affords the ability for one to prevent themselves from getting stuck in cycle of reincarceration for the rest of their life.

A sad fact worth noting is that the prison-industrial complex has seemed to caught onto this trojan horse within their system and have taken steps to restrict prisoner access to the valuable tools stored by prison libraries.

Three Ben & Jerry's tubs of ice-cream advertising a campaign for justice system reform

Ben & Jerry’s Justice Remix’d Campaign

If even Ben & Jerry’s is attempting to combat the pipeline issue, then so too should you through speaking out and making book donations to the prison nearest to you. Your donations could directly help someone gain the critical literacies necessary for them to escape the system which has possibly entrapped them since they were a teenager.

Writing as a System for Memory

February 19 2021

Over two thousand years ago, the Greek philosopher Plato warned against the dangers of writing. While many around him saw the system as an exciting method of spreading art and knowledge, Plato viewed things differently. His critique was that reading and writing will lead to less education in society, not more. This is due to the convenience writing creates, whereby you don’t have to memorize information. Instead you can keep it written down somewhere, outside your mind. Writing is a system “not for memory, but for reminder,” he said, offering only the semblance of wisdom.

Picture of Plato

Many rightfully dismiss Plato’s doomsday predictions. Contrary to what he expected, education has increased over time, and literacy has only ever helped, not hindered, that development. That’s not to say reading and writing are necessary for proper education, as Goody and Watt demonstrated by showing that oral cultures were just as intelligent as literate ones. Still, I don’t think anyone would say reading and writing have been categorically harmful. Many people’s education has benefited from books and other written methods of communication.

All that said, I think Plato’s main argument against writing—that it disincentivizes people to truly know and remember information—is an interesting one. It’s an empirical question, and looking at the data to see how well people in highly literature societies commit the things they read to memory should shed light on Plato’s claims. And it seems there is something to what he said. People don’t often remember very detailed information from what they read. Now in the Internet age, people rely even more on external methods to store information.

But this does not justify Plato’s ultimate dismissal of writing. Like all human actions, writing comes with tradeoffs. When you choose to do one thing, that necessarily means you willingly give up the time you could have spent on something else. This applies to writing, just on a much larger scale. When a society chooses to use writing as its primary method of education, it chooses to embrace both the positives and negatives associated with literacy, and forego the positives and negatives associated with oral societies. The problem Plato laid out then is much more complex than he seems to realize.

Picture of a brain with a USB cord extending from it

There are methods readers can use to better remember the material they read, such as writing down notes (which helps you remember the information in the process) and reflecting deeply on the material after reading. There’s also a possible rebuttal to Plato’s idea of the mind and what counts as knowledge from modern philosophy. The Extended Mind Thesis (EMT), famously argued by analytic philosopher David Chalmers, states that the human mind is not limited to the brain, but is also part of things external from a person, like a notebook or a computer. Thus, writing might have widened the human mind rather than diminished it. EMT is a highly debated concept, but is none-the-less a potentially interesting counter-point to Plato.

Literally Literate: How the idea of literacy has spread beyond the act of writing

February 17 2021February 17, 2021

A literacy meme that says “oh so think literacy is just reading and writing?” across the top and “tell me how that’s going for you” across the bottom.

Whether in class or in the real world, we have all heard terms such as “digital literacy”, “financial literacy” or even more. Alberta Education defines literacy as “the ability, confidence and willingness to engage with language to acquire, construct and communicate meaning in all aspects of daily living”. In this definition, we see how the idea of literacy has expanded beyond just the act of writing.

An image depicting types of literacy, such as information, technology, and data literacy.

Literacy has become shorthand for being able to navigate the complex systems that surround us. While in schools we still emphasize reading and writing the most, it is well documented that we need many literacies to become socially engaged citizens. As seen in Scribner and Cole’s “Literacy without schooling: Testing for intellectual effects”, literacy has long been entwined with schooling and therefore cognitive development. Researchers such as Scribner and Cole have pushed back on this, but in the modern American education system, one needs literacy to pursue education.

A student being handed a book by a teacher.

So what does the extrapolation of the term literacy say about how we culturally view the act of literacy? First, it emphasizes the connection between literacy and schooling. The idea one has to be “financially literate” in order to grow your financial resources is just one parallel to this theory. With this new definition and new terms, we see an even greater conflation of literacy and schooling. To be literate in a topic is to be educated on it as well as being able to navigate complex situations surrounding a given form of literacy.

Second, we see an increase in the divides between traditionally literate and non-literate persons. As many of these types of literacies still need reading and writing skills to learn and use, one has to be traditionally literate to pursue many of these new types of literacy, especially those lower in socioeconomic status. Digital literacy can be economically uplifting, but one has to pursue knowledge via already established literacy skills, such as reading tutorials or blog posts. With the internet, we see a greater challenge for non-literate people to overcome.

What does this mean for students? Does this evolving definition mean that students who are being taught literacy have more on their plate? In my opinion, I think this rather shows people opening up the “right to literacy” to more skillsets. We all need a complex understanding to navigate our increasingly complex world, and everyone has a right to learn these other types of literacies as well. This is why we see iPad tutorials for elderly populations, or financial advice nonprofits. Like traditional literacy, arming people with these skills allow them to transcend the barriers that keep them down, and become politically and socially aware of the world around them. People have a right to knowledge of the systems around them, and the expansion of the term literacy is just one example of that growing belief.