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School or Prison

schoolprison.com

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Re: School or Prison

#121

Post by watwut »

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…

When i am sick my work piles up.

Kids can actually take free days off. They don't actually have to do everything that was done while they have been away, usually we have done just small portion of it. Kids that struggle just continues struggling and kids that perceive school easy just continue lazying around.

In no way will few days off make you fall behind.

Re: School or Prison

#122

Post by ineedasername »

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…

That doesn't make it a prison: neither another student nor the teacher can step in and learn the material for your child. I don't know what you think would be an appropriate option there.

Also, you may have a job where none of your responsibilities are unique to you, but that's not often the case outside of some types of shift work. If I take a vacation or sick days, I have catching up to do. No one is going to step in for a couple of days and pickup where I left off on a project I've been working on for 3 months.

As for missing school, my kids go to typical mediocre public schools. When a student is struggling, they're given a little extra help. When they miss because they're sick, they're given plenty of time to makeup the work. And if a student is struggling so much that they can't reasonably move on to the next year's more complex material, the school literally devotes and extra year if resources to

Re: School or Prison

#123

Post by mlyle »

pmg102 wrote: post #111
em-bee wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

Yah, catch-up work often feels punitive but it appears to be universally expected by instructors. I'm a MS teacher, and I don't really care (though it does complicate my assessments), but my kids' teachers do really care about every piece of work being turned in.

Sometimes it's ridiculous-- my then-4th grader was taking Algebra I on the side, and had shown mastery on the 4th grade fraction curriculum on a test, but getting the large packet of fraction work that he missed during an absence was considered critically important. :P

> reveals that schools are talking bollocks when they suggest that taking a few days off to go on holiday during termtime

I do think that the kind of attitude that lets you ignore a bit of schooling here and there for a convenient vacation schedule does affect outcomes, though. I teach at a private school, but I think we're both aware of incentives for attendance, the reasons for them, and the areas in which they cause perverse outcomes.

Re: School or Prison

#125

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: School or Prison

#126

Post by notahacker »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #114
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,…

Autodidacts who thought school got in the way of their learning and never really got on with most of the other kids their age are overrepresented on HN, and a lot of people not in that category don't have particularly strong opinions about schools...

Re: School or Prison

#127

Post by pewpew_ »

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…

> 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.

In grade school, every time someone asks permission to use the bathroom they stop the flow of the lesson and valuable time is lost. In college the idea is that most of the students are responsible enough to handle the bathroom and food.

Re: School or Prison

#128

Post by odessacubbage »

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?

seeing how the sex offender registry in the us has created a legal sub-caste with no functional distinction between violent rapists and a 19 year old who sexted their 17 year old gf, while doing seemingly nothing to curb the actual abuse and trafficking of minors, it is hard to say the carceral approach has really been more effective or beneficial than what foucault advocated.

Re: School or Prison

#129

Post by Aerroon »

bettem wrote: post #120
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…

>People began to appreciate teachers during the pandemic’s home schooling period

People began to appreciate them for the daycare aspect and not really teaching. The statement might be reductive, but it's also the experience that many kids have with teachers and school.

Re: School or Prison

#130

Post by hshshs2 »

im3w1l wrote: post #56
aarroyoc wrote: post #28

My philosophy teacher said that both prisons and schools end up being a panopticon because you want the same in both places: maximize the feel of power of the authority, don't leave any place without surveillance,...

I have never seen a school with a literal panopticon (a tower from which everything can be seen, and which can not be seen into). So then if not a literal panopticon, a metaphorical panopticon? Doesn't mirror my school experience either. Feeling was that the teachers had no idea what was going on most of the time. But I didn't go to school in the US, maybe that's why?

Technological panopiticons now, most doors are locked or alarmed and the remaining entrances have video surveillance. Windows even on the first floor are often limited from opening very wide. Many American schools also have a police officer on site and it’s not unusual for police to stop children outside of school grounds for truancy.
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