Inside-out learning | MIT Technology Review

Since then, he spent countless hours in such environments in his role as a teacher of philosophy. He had “very few experiences” where he felt unsafe in prisons over the years, he says. “But the first time you enter, you feel insecure. I think this is what you are He should Feel. This teaches you something about what you feel anyone Go to prison. “

As a lecturer in the Experimental Study Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (ESG) for more than 40 years, Perlman has directed many students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology through their own publications from this clip via prison doors. Teaching first in prisons began in the 1980s, when he got the idea of ​​bringing Esg students who study the nonviolence to the Massachusetts Correctional Foundation in Norfolk to speak with men who are a life sentence. The experiment was so convincing that Perman has continued to return, and since the early first decade of the twentieth century, he was providing full courses behind bars.

In 2018, Perlman made the official character of these efforts made by the TEJI Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Carol Cavierti, a former professional in corrections. It is perceived to provide education at the college level with access to imprisoned individuals, enhance sympathy and provide a window in the criminal justice system for students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, TEJI creates opportunities for the two groups to learn alongside.

“There is difficult data that there is nothing that works like education to reduce apartments, to change the atmosphere inside the prison until prisons become less violent places.”

Lee Birman, PhD 89

“We believe that there are three basic components of education that everyone should have, regardless of the prison status: emotional reading and writing, digital literacy, and financial literacy.” Teji offers classes imprisoned in humanities, computer and business sciences, which can be applied to grades from private universities and community colleges. The emotional literacy component, which includes the Berlman philosophy courses, is taught in coordination “from the inside to the outside”, with a mixed group of imprisoned “internal” students and its “external” colleagues (from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other universities in which Teji courses are sometimes intertwined).

“I was really torn throughout my life,” says Birman.

Teji also works as a founder of people from academic circles and a criminal justice system. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it works with the Salon School of Management, the music and Music Department, the Presilla King Gray Center, and others in the prison courses and projects related to prison. By leading broader initiatives such as the Prison Education Union in Massachusetts and the New England Committee on the future of higher education in prison, Tiji helped set the foundation for great transformations in how people are imprisoned throughout the region and beyond to prepare to join society.

“I am both and they share the belief that education can be and must be a transformative force in the lives of imprisoned people,” says Cavierti. “But we also realize that the current system does not provide much opportunities for this.” Through Tiji, they work to create more.

Perman did not start reforming prison education. “There was no plan,” he says. “Before I am academic, I was a political organizer, so I have this political organizer. I just look for … Where is the opening you can run?”