Here’s the whole hype: While we love our historical survey courses and Music Humanities, until this semester we had never seen a Columbia class break out of the comfortable campus environment; most classes focus instead on students’ acquisition of multiple majors and the entire Western philosophical canon. Despite our many activities outside of class, Columbia is insular by design. This semester, through a course called Youth Voices on Lockdown, our routine has been shattered by the opportunity to spend eight Fridays at the Robert Davoren Correctional Facility on Rikers Island. Youth Voices allows us to share our privileged education with incarcerated youth, who in turn share their experiences with us.
This class, offered through the African-American studies department, puts three-person Columbia student-teaching teams with groups of about ten adolescent boys at Rikers. Each week we prepare two-hour lesson plans designed to create an environment where the students can empower themselves through knowledge and discussion. At 6:30 we meet outside the jail, and from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Friday evenings we hold our workshops in a special section of the adolescent dorms.
Our strategy is borrowed from the work of Paolo Freire, who advocated a reciprocal educational process. Instead of teachers deigning to hand down the authoritative word, the teachers and students engage in dialogue that promotes student self-empowerment. Facilitators don’t privilege their opinions over those of the students, but instead encourage students to probe more deeply into their own ideas and motivations. We try to move our discussions beyond superficial explanations so students can get to the origins of their opinions and begin to see causal relationships. In our last workshop, one student told us that he favored violence in the face of oppression. We asked him to be more specific, and he explained that he felt there was oppression against his community that justified violence in response. The exchange led to an intense debate about appropriate responses to oppression, and we left the workshop feeling that some really important issues had been addressed in a way that resonated deeply with the students.
It’s not easy to tell whether speaking with those students in their jail dormitory benefited them as much as it did us. Our teacher, Tongo Eisen-Martin, told us that “Columbia students always get more out of this than Rikers students,” and he may be right. But throughout this semester, we have been striving to build on the foundations laid by former Youth Voices participants. We have the benefit of their experience, and we hope that by putting their advice to good use we can improve the program for next time.
If there is a next time.
Youth Voices on Lockdown may be among the casualties of our magically shrinking endowment. The potential elimination of Youth Voices hurts two parties: Columbia students become further insulated, and Rikers students are deprived of an educational resource. Youth Voices on Lockdown provides an opportunity for the University budgeters to show that they are interested not only in promoting academic and finance skills, but also in what is done with those skills. Columbia students in the class mobilize their skills for someone else’s benefit and gain the chance to participate in a semester-long dialogue with adolescents who have not crossed the 116th Street threshold.
Through its dialogue, the class understandably sparks outrage in its Columbia participants. Jail stigmatizes its inhabitants—even Columbians who have dutifully studied the prison-industrial complex and railed against the injustices of the U.S. court system see this. News reports and academic articles often talk in numbers. We met kids. And they’re young—not quite old enough for college but old enough to no longer be juveniles in the eyes of New York law. At a time when it has become fashionable to try children as adults,” we’ve been overwhelmed by the feeling that there must be some mistake. How could the system have lost hope on these smart, energetic kids? How could our students be judged societal refuse at the age of 15? What does anyone gain by throwing young people into a jail instead of a place where they can learn something? These kids didn’t grow up in a vacuum—they’re products of their environments, just like everyone else. Who knows whether we’d be at Columbia without the Advanced Placement classes and guidance counselors?
Classes like Youth Voices on Lockdown give us the chance to confront these issues directly. The class is a challenge to our assumptions and, at the risk of sounding trite, it broadens our perspectives. This is the type of program Columbia should be celebrating and smacking on the cover of Columbia Magazine. Eliminating Youth Voices would be right in line with the University’s tendency toward insularity and away from meaningful exchange with other young people. Prove us wrong.
Sarah Leonard is a Columbia College junior majoring in history. Kate Redburn is a Columbia College junior majoring in history and African studies. Shock and Awe runs alternate Fridays. opinion@columbiaspectator.com