Teaching Inside: On the Dangers of the Savior Complex (in Prison Education but Also Generally)
As educators, it can be really tempting to get caught up in your own hype. You are in this position of profound power (how’s that for alliteration??), in the truest sense of the word, and the dynamic it creates can be intoxicating. And we’ve seen people fall prey to that intoxication. From allegations and actual incidents of impropriety, to people honing their skills of manipulation with their students as the guinea pigs, teachers/educators/professors wield the sort of influence that provides many a narcissist consistent wet dreams.
Abuse of this power is OBVIOUSLY bad. Like, it’s really terrible and, when it happens, it’s super obvious. We’ve all had those teachers who seem a little too weird and get inappropriately close; we have also had those teachers who seem to thrive off the power they get in the classroom. Classic power dynamics. But, I would like to turn your attention to the less obvious, less “classic” kinds of dangerous power abuse in the classroom.
The Savior Complex, often referred to as the White Savior Complex (think: Dangerous Minds), occurs when someone assumes a position of either help or authority in order to “save” someone ostensibly from him or herself, but under the guise, perhaps, of “saving” them from macro level power structures and systems that perpetuate oppression. The Savior Complexians (yes, I just made that up) don’t wear capes but may, at times, cape for those who eschew the “virtue” of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.
Except it’s really hard to pull yourself up by your bootstraps when you’re barefoot.
Anyway. I digress. The Savior Complexians often find themselves in fields related to education, because what other way to feel important and impactful than to actually shape the minds of your students? You have the power, in the classroom space, to actually determine what and how someone thinks. When teaching children, this dynamic is ever more pronounced because the mind of a child is more malleable; it is constantly growing (because, neuroscience and theories of cognitive development say so) and, as a teacher, you have the ability to do a lot of good!
For elementary school teachers, some of this is actually important. Basic literacy and numeracy skills are important for kids to learn. Our society is based on letters and numbers; understanding how those abstract concepts and symbols work is critical (because, in reality, language is more vehicle for culture and value transmission than mere communication tool) and building strength in these areas is of unquestionable import. Importance? I feel like import sounds more fancy.
But when our students get out of that Concrete Operational Stage and move to Formal Operations, things get a bit trickier because now they are more deeply exploring complex and abstract ideas and concepts like justice. The ideas that they hold about justice, how we fairly or unfairly govern our society, celebrate those who do really well, and punish those who cannot or do not abide by the rules we have created, are formulated piecemeal with inputs from family, friends (and, by extension, the families of friends), and school.
Within the school/home context, a more conservative teacher/parent might emphasize the ways in which individuals make their own decisions as independent agents of their own lives; therefore, the accolades related to, and the consequences of, their actions are theirs and theirs alone. A more liberal teacher/parent might prioritize an understanding of how systems in society disproportionately impact certain groups of citizens; behavior is seen as a result of not only individual choices but also of environmental circumstances. A centrist may find the middle ground between the two sides, not prioritizing the role of either the individual or society. Understanding that our notions of justice are largely (maybe not COMPLETELY) aligned with our political views, it is not surprising to think about the ways in which the imposition of these views on minds that are still forming can have a lasting impact.
As a far left leaning liberal who feels she has a decent grasp of the shenanigans going on in the world, and also as a FLLL who spends a large amount of time teaching in prison classroom, I have often found myself wanting to be the savior. I know, I KNOW! On my high horse of “social justice and structural change through educational opportunity,” I may have stepped into the classroom my first time with the agenda to provide my students with the master’s tools in order to subversively dismantle his house (props to Audre Lorde right there). Like, I envisioned that my students would magically sprout these social justice wings with which I would outfit them and we would all fly off and revamp criminal justice on a large scale.
I dream big.
I walked in with this whole ridiculous idea of what I would do, and what I could do, and what I thought my role should have been. And it was ALL WRONG. What I learned, or rather had to simply recognize and acknowledge, was that the very oppressive structures — made manifest through limited access to information and unquestioned conformity to a particular ideal — that I wanted my students to intellectually rebel against was the same sort of structure I was imposing in the class by limiting their exposure to certain theoretical arguments and ideologies.
I have mentioned this article in the past, but it bears mentioning again. Castro & Brawn (2017) did an AMAZING job in their paper that talks exactly about this, and does so through a lens of critical pedagogy and an analysis/critique of whether or not critical pedagogy, as an instructional paradigm, is effective — or can be fully implemented — inside a correctional facility. Unfortunately the article only came out this year, so I spent a year doing “teaching inside” all wrong. I got frustrated when students didn’t see — but, more honestly, didn’t agree with — the ideas I simply assumed they were starved for.
Because, assumptions and expectations. They will fuck you up every time.
The piece of advice that came to mind once I had this epiphany came from one of my high school teachers who remains an important influence. He said, in an Ethics class, “Empowerment means you facilitate the cultivation of critical thinking skills. Doing so means that you might have students who decide, after critical analysis, that they don’t buy what you’re selling. And that has to be ok,” (props to Eck for that life changing advice that I barely paid attention to when I was 17). Our job as teachers, particularly teachers of adults, is to present information in as complete a manner as possible. I also believe that education should be designed to train us to deconstruct and reconstruct the social structures that govern our lives, and do so in a way that reflects the utopian, unrealistic sense of fairness upon which our revisionist history has erected our “democracy.”
Inside a correctional facility, it is even more important to present as complete a picture as possible of ideas and concepts. Arguably, internet access is restricted in most (state run?) correctional facilities (I do not have a data point for that; I am just going to say it and if it is false, let me know). In addition, prison libraries range from awful to terrible. Some of the larger, better resourced, often law focused libraries are decent, but access to general literature is severely constrained. So, for students taking classes, their instructors are their sole sources of information. If a student has friends and/or family members outside who can help with things like research, they are lucky and are also an anomaly. Brawn (Castro & Brawn, 2017) — seriously, this article is brilliant — expressed concern that this limit on information, especially from the instructor, could easily become a replication of the oppressive structure that governs information restriction; deciding what your students will or will not read is the embodiment of privilege for a teacher teaching inside. And I was doing that. I was so comfortable in that privilege, afforded merely by my position as “teacher” and “facility outsider” that I didn’t even try to recognize what was happening.
Because pretending you are a savior is intoxicating. It is this perverse manipulation of power that only undermines the very goals you are trying to achieve. It is going to a “third world” country and building a house, taking a picture with all the brown children, and not recognizing maybe that you built the house on top of the community’s water supply. It is voyeuristic volunteerism, and it is dangerous.
