Setting Students’ Hearts On Flame: How a Humanizing Higher Education Rooted in the Humanities Can Be Beneficial for Justice-Involved People

What seems to you the luxury of endless time is, for . . .students in prison, the essence of their punishment.The absence of a future.Segregated in a space and time where there is no movement .. .one day typically stretches out for decades.-Dalke and Cohen, Critical Perspectives on Teaching in Prison So far as I could tell, G, an elderly incarcerated student taking my philosophy of education course at the medium-security state correctional facility that fall, had all but given up on himself.This notion was partially confirmed deep into the semester.He caught me off guard mid-lesson when he casually and sincerely let me know how much he appreciated the course, and, crucially, that he had not had the opportunity really to use his mind in "years, maybe decades."I cry almost every time I think about this.What more could I have done beyond thanking G for his comment?More broadly, what does carceral higher education have to say against the backdrop of dehumanization upon which it unfolds, where people are alive, but time is essentially dead?Any satisfactory answers, if there are any to be found at all, will have something to do with humanization.In this essay, I endeavor to flesh out a concept of humanization as an essential precondition of carceral higher education.First, I take as a qualitative starting point for a humanities-based education Ralph Waldo Emerson's claim that colleges and universities are at their best when they aim to set their students' hearts aflame.Second, I examine this idea in relation to a liberal arts education that is firmly rooted in the humanities.Third, I consider the dialogical nature of the humanities and what this might have to do with affording students the opportunity to understand, expand, and transform, with others, their reality.