Education, prison and pandemic: from exceptionality to “disappointment”

Abstract

The arrival of COVID-19 to the world, and to our region in particular, brought a situation of exception to the customary normality in all walks of life and changes that resented individual and community organization. The pandemic deepened pre-existing inequalities and left more social groups in a vulnerable situation, as is the case of people deprived of their liberty. These days, uncertainty reigns in all sectors of the population, while normality falls apart, melts in the face of the pandemic. In the field of education in prisons in Argentina, this exceptionality is constituted, on the one hand, by the health emergency and, on the other, by the social, preventive and compulsory isolation declared in March 2020 that caused the closure of schools and the prohibition of face-to-face classes in all their levels and modalities, including the context of punitive confinement. This generated the implementation of a Pedagogical Continuity Plan by the education portfolios of the national and provincial government. In the present work we will try to address the abrupt dilemma between face-to-face education and virtual education in the field of deprivation of liberty, the obstacles that educators face in prisons (where exceptionalism is transformed into “disappointment”) to guarantee pedagogical continuity and the challenges that education, understood as a human right, must face in this context in the context of the pandemic.