News

The sad truth of teaching in prison is that certain elements transcend the prison walls.  Elements such as the psyche of our students and the experiences our students bring with them into the classroom are good examples.  These are the same as in schools outside of prison.  The difference is that our students generally have lived harder, more stressful and more unstable lives than the traditional student outside of prison.  As such, they carry a lot of baggage with them.   This is baggage we must overcome if we want to connect with these troubled students.

Our Profession as Prison Educators

Let’s face it:  our profession is one of last hopes.  Our students generally come to us beaten down, angry, confused, and even scared.  They’ve been sentenced to a number of years away from their families and friends.  They are in fight or flight mode.  And once they realize that fight mode is not an option, they tend to fortify their mental walls.  They tend to mentally move away from the forefront of their existence and hide in their mental recesses.

To those outside of prison the idea of a library conjures images of rows of books, a helpful librarian, a few computers for research, and even, perhaps, a comfortable chair to plop down into for a nice afternoon of literary exploration.  After all, a library is a place where patrons go to learn, explore new ideas, and enjoy those bound collections of printed pages I so affectionately call books.

I can remember frequenting the Brevard, NC public library, the Topeka, Kansas public library, and more than a few school libraries over the years.  This wasn’t so much to revel in the written word, but it was true and it was real.  Even though I found these locations to be more social arenas — since I had friends who worked at each or went with me to each — all of the libraries reminded me of a nice, quiet place to just sit and enjoy the solitude.  They were quiet enclaves where one could grow to be more, where one was surrounded by centuries of knowledge just waiting to be discovered.

Prisons were used in Europe as early as the 12th century, but they were not originally considered necessary by the founders of the United States. In 1787, concerned citizens in Pennsylvania founded the Pennsylvania Prison Society. The Correctional Education Movement also started in Pennsylvania, at the Philadelphia Walnut Street Jail, where clergyman William Rogers first offered instruction to inmates.

David Snedden and other prominent, WWI-era, urban school reformers were originally interested in reformatory schools as compulsory attendance “laboratories.” Soon after, reformers found additional reasons to study correctional education programs. Snedden reported on models of vocational, physical, and military education in his 1907 book, Administration and Educational Work of American Juvenile Reform Schools, and summarized how educators in public schools could learn from correctional educators. Snedden’s work was based on the principles he observed in practice in reformatory schools. He further investigated juvenile correctional education to identify additional models for use in school settings.

Q. Why did you select Bates and Clyne as composers in residence?

A. Even being so different one from the other, they both use the orchestra with personal language — but not forgetting that they have to express feelings. Even using a modern language and trying to invent new possibilities of timbre and harmonies and counterpoint in the orchestra — even doing that, they don’t forget that the purpose of music is to touch people, not just to make noise.

Q. Many people don’t really “get” what a conductor does. Can you describe the essence of conducting?

A. I come from a school where we don’t learn the art of conducting without learning deeply the music. I started the violin first, and I had a degree in piano, and then I studied composition for ten years. And then when by accident I discovered that I had some qualities to be a conductor. I went to Milan, where I studied with Antonino Votto, who had been an assistant to Toscanini in the ’20s.

Q. Does this happen often, that individual orchestra members will write to a conductor?

A. No, no, this is very rare. It was really an expression of love.

Unfortunately, not long after, at a certain point in the first season I had a problem with arrhythmia of my heart. I fell at the podium, and I had to miss a few weeks. But I’m well now; this was an arrhythmia problem — not a problem of musical rhythm!

Q. From the reports I’ve seen, you’re now feeling strong.

Q. How did they like it?

A. They were very impressed, and they made very nice and intelligent comments about what they heard. They said that they didn’t expect that they would like this music so much, because this music was so new for them.

And again, they were so wonderful and full of discipline and very attentive. So I think today we have to use this great weapon that we have — that is music — to put people more and more together. In fact, that is my experience, through all the concerts that I do for friendship, going around the world, in cities like Sarajevo or Cairo.

By Richard Scheinin

[email protected]

Last year, when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed in San Francisco for the first time since 1987, Riccardo Muti was on the podium. This eminent conductor is practically a brand name, synonymous with La Scala (where he was music director from 1986 to 2005), the Philadelphia Orchestra (1980-92) and other great orchestras, including the Vienna Philharmonic, with which he enjoys an association of 40 years.

But when I spoke by phone with Muti — now in his second season as Chicago’s music director — he became most engaged when discussing prisons. Yes, prisons.