Popular education, n.
1. [Education for liberation]—Popular education is essential in developing new leadership to build a bottom-up movement for fundamental social change, justice and equality; see also liberation, revolution, social and economic equality.
2. [Accessible and relevant]—We begin by telling our stories, sh 2. aring and describing our lives, experiences, problems and how we feel about them.
3. [Interactive]—We learn by doing: we participate in dialogue and activities that are fun, including cultural arts such as drama, drawing, music, poetry and video.
4. [Education with an attitude]—We are not neutral: through dialogue and reflection we are moved to act collectively—creating change that will solve the problems of those at the bottom in our communities, those of us who are most oppressed, exploited and marginalized.
5. [Egalitarian]—We are equal. All of us have knowledge to share and teach. All of us are listeners and learners, creating new knowledge and relationships of trust as we build for our future.
6. [Historic]—We see our experience within the context of history, indicating where we have come from and where we are going.
7. [Inclusive]—We see ourselves in relation to all people, including those of different ethnic groups and nationalities, social classes, ages, genders, sexualities and abilities.
8. Consciousness raising]—We critically analyze our experiences, explaining the immediate causes of our problems and discovering the deeper root causes in the structures of the economy, political institutions and culture.
9. [Visionary]—We are hopeful, creating an optimistic vision of the community and global society we want for ourselves and our families.
10. [Strategic]—We are moved to collective action, developing a plan for short-term actions to address the immediate causes of our problems, and long-term movement building to address the root causes of our problems.
11. [Involves the whole person]—We use our head for analysis, reflection, and consciousness; our heart for feeling and vision; and our feet for collective action for the short term and the long haul.
Source: Project South
“Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings. And the practice of disappearing vast numbers of people from poor, immigrant, and racially marginalized communities has literally become big business.” Angela Y Davis, “Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex,” Colorlines, Fall 1998).
Discussion in small groups: What do you think of Davis’s quotation? What is the author saying about prisons?
Do you agree or disagree? Explain.
Sociologist Paul Hirschfield makes the following salient argument in his recent article “Preparing for prison? The criminalization of school discipline in the USA”:
“Penal expansion helped the State manage both rural and urban economic crises.
With respect to urban economic devastation, a campaign of arrest and incapacitation
of an unprecedented pace and scope kept a lid on unrest and opened the door
to strategic urban redevelopment within designated ‘safe zones’ (Parenti, 2000). The
prison-industrial complex also curbed the decline of many white rural areas and,
more broadly, pacified the white working class. Criminal justice expansion artificially tightens the labor market (Western and Beckett, 1999), stimulates the economy of ailing rural communities (Huling, 2002), and affords rural residents greater electoral representation and population-based federal appropriations (Huling, 2002). Accordingly, many rural politicians stake their political careers on the location of juvenile and adult prisons in their districts and the hundreds of stable, well-paying jobs that they promise to generate for their constituents.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzh32Zp_PYk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWvKlp1MVBc
Current all time high prison population in Iowa
The prison population on March 22, 2011 was a record high of 8,977 offenders.
➢ Today, April 1, the population is 8,970. If trends do not change, the DOC will have a record high of over 9,000 offenders.
