Prison University

            I was immersed in Stanley Aronowitz’s The Knowledge Factory when I encountered David Schalkwyk’s OP-ED piece in the LA Times, “Reading Hamlet Behind Bars.”  My undergraduate education as an English major, maybe surprisingly, did not require that I read a single Shakespearean play.  The only knowledge I have of Hamlet was from watching the excellent filmic version starring Kenneth Brannagh when I was studying for the English Subject GRE.  What drew me to the article was my curiosity about prisoners reading Shakespeare.  Further, after being inundated with Aronowitz’s scathing analysis of the demise of the broad, liberal education curriculum in American universities, what I read in Schalkwyk’s piece became all the more poignant.

            Aronowitz describes the modern university: “Like a roach motel, the university will let students in, only to release them as intellectual corpses” (63).  He criticizes the specialization resulting from certain areas being more financially lucrative than others at the great cost of producing less well-rounded citizens.  Specifically, he  poses the goal of finding out how can we “inspire skeptical, not to say cynical, students who, having been encouraged to turn away from knowledge for its own sake in favor of the most practical conception of the role of education, may believe that general education is ‘useless’” (192).  After reading about the prisoners of Robben Island, a South African political prison, I was struck with a different perspective.  One man had convinced his fellows to sign “their names beside their favorite passages” (A32) in a copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare that he surreptitiously circulated throughout the prison.  Schalkwyk explains, “When they signed their names against Shakespeare’s text, each prisoner recognized something of himself and his relation to others in the words of a stranger” (A32).  What I gathered from this was not that Shakespeare’s texts are universal or representative of mankind, as Schalkwyk implies, but rather, that when people are motivated by the desire to understand and express themselves, they will find a vehicle with which to do so. 

            What this might mean for education is that there is no perfect or ideal curriculum that will produce an ideal citizen. Instead, what needs to be developed is the attitude toward and awareness of the purpose of education.  In encouraging knowledge for its own sake, Aronowitz idealistically abstracts the pursuit of knowledge from the everyday lives of the people who might pursue it.  The prisoners of Robben Island demonstrate, conversely, exactly why one might be inspired to pursue knowledge.  They received no degrees from their “Prison University”—in fact, they would have suffered grave consequences if their book had been discovered—and it is doubtful the passages themselves taught them any practical lesson.  What they did receive was an opportunity, which they took, to treat something outside themselves as a part of themselves, to internalize someone else’s words and insight and thereby connect more deeply to their humanity.  This, I move, is the purpose of education, and a university degree is just one avenue for this process.  Yes, practical skills and specialized knowledge must also be disseminated in order to produce capable individuals, but that is only one facet of humanity’s ongoing pursuit of understanding, expression, and connection

Works Cited

Aronowitz, Stanley. The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and

Creating True Higher Learning. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.  Print.

Schalkwyk, David.  “Reading Hamlet Behind Bars.”  Los Angeles Times.  Op-Ed.  25 November

2012.  A32.  Print.