Archive: Conrad Black on teaching fellow inmates

Editor's note: In Saturday's National Post, Conrad Black writes an exclusive column detailing his release from prison. In the column Black speaks fondly of the many fellow prisoners who he befriended. This column, originally published Nov. 14, 2009, details how Black taught English to a number of inmates.

My arrangement with my gracious temporary hosts includes the understanding that while I write a great deal for publication in many places in several countries, I do not describe what happens here, other than in the sketchiest terms. I depart slightly, but inoffensively, from that understanding to record some experiences I have had as a tutor in English to high school-leaving candidates here.

There are approximately 1,800 residents in this institution, the low-security facility in the federal prison at Coleman, Fla., where I reside pending the U.S. Supreme Court's disposition of the 15% or so of the charges made against me four years ago that survived the trial.

They comprise a rich and varied canvass of personalities and experiences, from misbegotten innocents almost saintly in their naive and stoical endurance of injustice, to egregious but usually engaging scoundrels, to invariably courtly and wryly entertaining alleged pillars of organized crime. I find almost all people interesting, and have had absolutely no difficulties with anyone here, residents or the regime.

The education department offers various courses in trades and skills, from plumbing and engineering to computer operation and conventional typing, and residents who cannot establish that they matriculated from secondary school are conscripted into attempting to do so. They tend to be a very disparate and rather under-motivated group.

It was my good fortune that some of the managers of the library here were aware of books I had written and convinced the education superior that I should do something in that area and not wait to be dragooned into tending dandelions in the compound or emptying recycling bins and the like. Everyone here "works," but the tasks, though not the pay-scales, sometimes remind me of the infamous pre-Thatcher Spanish practices of Fleet Street, where absentees or fictitious people were paid for performing non-existent jobs.

There were enough teachers, almost all of them inmates, but it was thought that I might be able to assist in specialized work with a few candidates for the English diploma. (This was in addition to an evening course I was giving in U.S. history in one of the residential units.)

I was given a table and a chair at the back of the Vocational Training pavilion, where, for a few weeks, my reading of newspapers and other material was sporadically interrupted by improbable scholars wending their downcast way toward me on a forced march: I was the last resort before they were effectively declared inaccessible to higher education.

I hadn't liked teachers when I was at school, except for a few that I remember with gratitude, and as I generally prepared myself for examinations, was never much convinced of their importance beyond elementary education. The last thing I wanted was more intimate contact with them.

In fact, my greatest moment of enthusiasm for the government of Quebec, and there haven't been many in the last 45 years, was when Premier Daniel Johnson (Senior) — for whom I occasionally wrote speeches that he rarely used — in 1967 broke a French-language teachers' strike on Montreal Island. He did this by threatening to decertify the teachers' union, arrest its executives, impound its assets, and place a Quebec provincial policeman in every classroom while he and the vice-premier, Jean-Jacques Bertrand, delivered the lectures by closed-circuit television to the students and the teachers' salaries were rebated to the taxpayers of Quebec.

To my regret at the time, as a rural newspaper editor, the teachers caved and Quebec was denied this most promising experiment in progressive education. As an observer, and later as an employer and as a parent, I have been dismayed by the deterioration of the state education system in a number of jurisdictions in several countries.

None of this prepared me in the slightest for the cynicism, skepticism and defeatism I encountered when well past retirement age and in the most unpromising circumstances, I, involuntarily and with no professional formation, launched my pedagogical career with unpromising, and, to say the least, chronically unenthused charges.

I began with relaxed conversation, to put them at their ease, make the point that I wasn't part of the regime but rather was a victim of it as they were; that I wasn't trying to force them to do anything, but offered an opportunity if they wanted to make something out of their time here, and in doing so to get the better of their tormentors. This preliminary discussion gave me a sense of how great the cultural hurdles were going to be, and usually, though not always, they were fairly daunting.

Rousseau was correct that one-on-one is the most effective way to teach. I did the obvious things, which are not possible with a full class, of adapting humorous examples from their own lives for sentence structure and the meaning of words, to make them easier to remember, and of assigning essay subjects tailored to their own interests.

One gambit that never failed, though it often generated reams of salacity, was "Describe the sexiest woman you have ever seen."

I devised tactical essay-writing techniques for special needs, urging spelling- and grammar-challenged candidates to memorize 20 polysyllabic words for timely insertion and commending Hemingway's Snows of Kilimanjaro as illustrative of the virtues of short, simple sentences.

I found myself becoming an impassioned champion of the 32-year-old small-time drug dealer who had six children with five women, none of them attached by the bourgeois relic of matrimony; and of the charming and elegant young man who had one child and an ex-wife, but wasn't aware of the spelling of his son's name. It was impossible not to like the world-weary Cuban ex-CIA operative, the Puerto Rican fisherman from Key West who was illiterate when he began with me, and the Sopranos-like former bill-collector of one of the New York Mafia families. (He sat next to me at a religious service one day and whispered the question of how much could be got for the candelabra, a joke.)

My little domain grew to four tables and 10 chairs, and two other tutors for other subjects, a former teacher and commodities trader from Arkansas, and an atomic submarine torpedoman and graduate of the U.S. Navy nuclear propulsion course, from Tennessee. Our tables became a sort of Hot Stove Lounge, with colourful reminiscences interspersed with novel study techniques on all the subjects being tested, but with a good, almost constant esprit around the tables.

The Bureau of Prisons holds these examinations every month or two, so I have had about 100 students. Almost all have graduated, though some needed two or even three tries.

We tutors have been largely responsible for almost doubling the number of graduates annually from this facility. I would not meet the usual definition of a socialist, and many of my students acted unwisely and unscrupulously to get where they are.

But many are victims of legal and social injustice, inadequately provided for by the public assistance system, and over-prosecuted and vengefully sentenced. The greater competitiveness of the world makes the failures of American education, social services and justice unaffordable, as well as repulsive.

In tens of millions of undervalued human lives, as in the consumption of energy and the addiction to consumer debt, the United States pays a heavy price for an ethos afflicted by wantonness, waste and official human indifference. In other advanced countries, the custodial system is dedicated to the sort of work that has almost accidentally flourished here.

It has been my good fortune to be well-received in some learned and distinguished places, and I am always grateful for considered applause, but never more so than when complimented by my students on receipt of my advanced tutor's certificate at our graduating ceremony here a couple of months ago.

It is unjust that I am here at all, and I hope not to be here much longer, but I have rarely been more delighted than when formerly surly and sluggish students embrace me when they learn they have graduated, as they hasten to telephone or email their families. This unbidden sojourn has given me a taste of the rewards of teaching. It pains me to verge on platitudes, but life's rewards do sometimes come in strange ways and unexpected places.

National Post