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School or Prison

schoolprison.com

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Re: School or Prison

#111

Post by pmg102 »

em-bee wrote: post #87
alisonatwork wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the forced labor in schools, barracks, hospitals and factories? I understand there are some instances where this might be the case, but generally people go to those places because they want to, or because it offers them a favorable outcome that they're willing to temporarily trade some autonomy for. You can deconstruct the whole of society and make an argument that all labor exchanged for capital is oppressi…

when i am sick at work, then i can take a few days off. (with or without pay). whatever work needs to get done, will be done by someone else, and i join back in without penalty when i am ready when my kids miss school, they have to catch up the work they missed. if they already struggle then they can't afford to get sick because they will fall to far behind and may not be able to catch up. so yes, school is forced la…

Ex-primary teacher here. At any one time a certain percentage of kids in the class would be off sick, it was a given. So the curriculum doesn't proceed linearly but more like a helix: it circles around and around the same topics year by year with each child being supported to learn at the level they are - always a broad range in any one class.

So it's in my experience totally untrue to suggest that any child would have to "catch up" any learning missed due to sickness (and also reveals that schools are talking bollocks when they suggest that taking a few days off to go on holiday during termtime will have any noticeable adverse effect, but shhhh)

Re: School or Prison

#112

Post by watwut »

tikhonj wrote: post #81
paulpauper wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is because tall, rectangular buildings maximize volume to surface area, whether a hospital school or prison. It is not a form of social control or domination. it is more efficient this way. A one-story hospital would be prohibitively expensive to build in an urban area, and it is not like healthcare is not already too expensive.

High-end office builds are also efficient rectangular prisms far more often than not, yet they don't feel like hospitals, schools or prisons. I've spent extensive time in all of these except prisons, and I can tell you the difference is stark. What explains that? Is it all just down to expensive trim and interior decor? I'm sure that plays a part, but that was never my main impression. Instead, it comes down to the l…

But they would fit right into these pictures. Not super expensive design offices, but normal administrative building looks roughly the same.

Re: School or Prison

#113

Post by dorkwood »

ineedasername wrote: post #100

A more meaningful comparison would be bathroom privileges. In prison you can pretty much poop or get a drink of water whenever you want. In school you need special permission, and hope the teacher wasn't in a bad mood or that 3 other kids hadn't needed to pee in the last half hour, meeting some mental quota the teacher has for the appropriate # of people that should have to use the toilet during a given period of tim…

When I was eight years old I had a teacher who told us that if we needed to use the bathroom, rather than ask "can I use the bathroom?" we should instead say "I'm going to the bathroom". She said she would never stop us from going, but that we should at least let her know why we're leaving the room.

I never got to experience that again at school after I left the second grade.

Re: School or Prison

#114

Post by matthewmacleod »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #66

Public school is a prison where both parents can abandon their children to be raised by strangers while the parents chase what they really love: money. We make ourselves feel better by teaching them a few worthwhile things during their minimum 13 years in lockdown, coupled with a massive public jobs program, but most of it is a waste of precious family time where parents should be teaching and loving their own childr…

This is a good example of a phenomenon I see where this site in particular often seems to have an antipathy towards “public school” that’s wildly foreign to me, as someone who had a pretty bog-standard, middle-of-the-road public education in Scotland.

I sometimes wonder if it’s down to a fundamentally different experience at schools in the US that I’m not aware of?

I feel like I went in one end of the school system, and then came out twelve years later able to read, write, play musical instruments, understand the natural world, think critically, use a computer, and generally having a wide variety of other skills. Teaching quality was mostly fine, with staff who seemed to be pretty engaged. I spent plenty of time outside school with both parents, and I came out with a bunch of skills and knowledge that neither of them would have been able to teach me. My experience was far from perfect, but it was a million miles away from being “a prison”.

The “school is a waste of time” argument seems to be popular in these circles. Is it down to cultural differences? Or maybe it’s just the iceberg tip of a deeper and more earnestly held view about a fundamental restructuring of society and childhood?

Re: School or Prison

#115

Post by drzaiusapelord »

lldbg wrote: post #73
cyberbanjo wrote: post #4

Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons? Michel Foucault

Foucault advocated for pedophilia, and that knowledge has tainted him for me. Can he still be a moral authority?

1960's-1970s celebrity culture was full of young groupies sleeping with older men. Bowie, Jagger, Ozzy, etc were all doing it, and often brazen about it, so its not overly surprising that European intellectuals just wanted it formalized as they were doing it too. They felt it harmless enough for their own selfish reasons and wrapped it up into a 'autonomy of self' argument that, of course, was very self-serving. I think this is good evidence that when you stray outside of your specialty (adult ethics) then you can make some obvious mistakes in other specialized fields (children's sexuality). It probably doesn't help that you have both a strong anti-authoritarian movement and sexual revolution movement happening at the same time, which only added fuel to this fire.

Its still wrong, but anachronistically wrong a bit like how many elements the founding fathers put in which are good government but did so under the unforgivable sin of slavery. If that's too 'ancient history' for you, let's consider Brendan Eich's contribution to Firefox but also understand he is a homophobe. We can still use and appreciate Firefox's technical advancements without worrying about Eich's homophobia.

Age of consent skeptics are as old as time anyway. It rages on today in the modern libertarian party and incel culture. Anti-authoritarian and reactionary movements often become victimizers of children and women and racial/religious minorities because these groups are often protected by authority. When you remove authority, suddenly they are powerless and easy prey to whatever replaces that authority. The most obvious example are soldiers raping women in towns they take over.

Re: School or Prison

#116

Post by joe_the_user »

hndudette2 wrote: post #90
jclulow wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, not really? I think you're projecting the behaviour of the USSR (or whatever) onto the architectural style. From an aesthetic perspective, brutalism can be surprisingly pleasing -- especially if you throw in some trees: https://twitter.com/Karl_poyzer/status/1246511600300896257

It's the distinctness and uniqueness of those examples, as well as that they're surrounded by trees/nature, that make them so beautiful. Brutalism as intentional art, not as an unintended byproduct of cost-saving or simply not caring. The depressing nature of a lot of brutalist architecture (especially that created by governments) is the uniformity, homogeneity and the mass-produced faux-utilitarian feeling it evokes…

Brutalism is simply an architectural style characterized by the use of raw concrete. It can be done well in various ways and badly in various ways, like virtually any style.

It's worth noting that Phil is not just wrong about brutalism but also wrong about these examples being (primarily) brutalist. Not generally using raw concrete, they would not be considered brutalist. The modern "box" has been largely discarded by contemporary institutional architects in favor of rough, pseudo-gabbled, uh, crap, as shown in the majority of these examples.

I'd say a bad brutalist building is like a rough bureaucratic dictate whereas present bad institutional architecture is like a bureaucratic dictate but rewritten with contemporary niceness guides - "this is a notice concerning your rights under the involuntary amputation act"

Re: School or Prison

#117

Post by mlyle »

yrimaxi wrote: post #82
alisonatwork wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the forced labor in schools, barracks, hospitals and factories? I understand there are some instances where this might be the case, but generally people go to those places because they want to, or because it offers them a favorable outcome that they're willing to temporarily trade some autonomy for. You can deconstruct the whole of society and make an argument that all labor exchanged for capital is oppressi…

d/

Sure, there's no inevitability, but there can also be ways that make sense.

It might be possible to make a space launch vehicle that's short and squat, or operate a factory without any regular worker hours, but it's going to have some costs compared to our current equilibrium

Re: School or Prison

#118

Post by lemonspat »

ineedasername wrote: post #100

A more meaningful comparison would be bathroom privileges. In prison you can pretty much poop or get a drink of water whenever you want. In school you need special permission, and hope the teacher wasn't in a bad mood or that 3 other kids hadn't needed to pee in the last half hour, meeting some mental quota the teacher has for the appropriate # of people that should have to use the toilet during a given period of tim…

I had the same college experience. I nearly raised my hand to request permission but saw other kids just leaving class (sophomores I think)

Re: School or Prison

#120

Post by bettem »

ineedasername wrote: post #100

A more meaningful comparison would be bathroom privileges. In prison you can pretty much poop or get a drink of water whenever you want. In school you need special permission, and hope the teacher wasn't in a bad mood or that 3 other kids hadn't needed to pee in the last half hour, meeting some mental quota the teacher has for the appropriate # of people that should have to use the toilet during a given period of tim…

> hope the teacher wasn't in a bad mood or that 3 other kids hadn't needed to pee in the last half hour, meeting some mental quota the teacher has for the appropriate # of people that should have to use the toilet during a given period of time.

This is a fairly reductive statement. Dealing with children is incredibly taxing and difficult. Teachers are [in my country] underpaid and under-appreciated and I believe this kind of rhetoric doesn’t do them justice. People began to appreciate teachers during the pandemic’s home schooling period, but that seems [anecdotally] to have dropped off since children have returned to regular schooling.

> when I hit college and realized "Hold on, I can just get up & go?."

Because you were [likely] an adult now who needs to be able to regulate their own behaviours. No surprise here.

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