Reconstructing Correctional Education on the Basis of New Critical Realities. Implications for Teachers, Administrators, and Policymakers.

In the region encompassing Arizona, California, Hawaii, Mexico, and Nevada, the tremendous gap between technological progress and social problems is fraught with new critical realities that mandate new approaches for correctional education. Critical realities challenge this region as it grapples with shifts in demographics, inconsistent social mores, global economic realities, new education paradigms, and increases in antisocial behavior. Nine basic lessons are inherent in new critical realities: a change in one part of the culture has an impact on the other parts of it; the feeling is that daily life is getting more squalid, expensive, and dangerous; the task of those in correctional education is to show that the so-called dilemmas are really solvable problems; broad education is the cure for racial antipathies; people must not be content with a philosophy of progress but must study it and try to improve it; grades, test scores, and diplomas are not adequate indicators of proficiency in basic skills; the greatest threat to the future is apathy; and freedom begins where economic necessity ends; and work must be analyzed in terms that reflect workers' real competitive positions in a global community. The implications for correctional education are social-self realization as the purpose of correctional education; a learning theory called the theory of Instrumentalism; a holistic curriculum; a process of teaching as opposed to training; and evaluation in the form of developmental profiles. (YLB)