I would take out or obscure the ones that have names in a non-English language. I was able to guess two knowing a little German and Japanese.
School or Prison
181–190 of 497 posts
Re: School or Prison
#182In China, a lot of schools in poorer areas have bars with them, which makes them look like prisons. These aren't highly competitive schools, so it doesn't make sense for the bars to be for the students. Rather they're to prevent people from breaking in and stealing the furniture.
https://img.i-scmp.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=contain,width=1098,...
Re: School or Prison
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Going to be honest though. School (at least mine) functioned very similarly to a prison, in fact, most prisons had better conditions than my secondary school. There is a simple fact that schools can be glorified daycare so that workers can offload the burden of childcare. For this purpose, a prison makes sense. Despite not being the most humane considering the kids didn’t do any crime worthy of rehabilitation.
You're confident about this comparison. Have you been to prison?
I think it is more common than you think, especially among people who grew up in low socioeconomic situations.
Re: School or Prison
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Foucault advocated for pedophilia, and that knowledge has tainted him for me. Can he still be a moral authority?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petition_against_age_... More or less the entire French Intellectual establishment argued at that time for "the decriminalization of all consensual relations between adults and minors below the age of fifteen". While I agree that seems extremely stupid, it is based on a morally tenable argument that people under that age could give consent. That may be incorrect but if accepted…
That was indeed what I was referring to. Rather than interpreting your first paragraph as a pardon of Foucault, I consider it a condemnation of the group entire.
If your (or their, the french intellectual elite's/literati's) philosophy is so morally vacuous that it fails to recognize the sexual exploitation of children and young teenagers as reprehensible, then it is worth less than nothing. It is an evil.
Consent is not enough, is the common modern view. Power structures and actual power matters too.
In some sense, surely advocating (almost successfully, if I recall correctly) for a repeal of age of consent laws must be worse than the crime itself. That is, if we are of the opinion that pedophilia is wrong. Consider the difference between orchestrating many murders and a single murder as an analogy.
No, Foucault (and the others on that list) have been let off the hook for too long. The aesthetician in me is horrified, youth is beauty and they want it defiled?
And a disclaimer; I am of course a conservative in every sense of the word, and this is my perspective.
Re: School or Prison
#185A 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…
Comments here suggest you're in the majority with your experience, though I wonder if there might be a little participation bias with regard to strong memories of such bad policies. As a contrast, at my school the policy was far more reasonable: you still needed permission to leave, but if you didn't abuse the privilege—using it every day, or disappearing for half the lesson—the teacher wouldn't give you any grief.
That sounds like a very similar policy to the one the parent described. Essentially, it's up to the teacher to decide. Unless they codified what "abuse the privilege" meant, you're still at the mercy of a teacher's whims.
Re: School or Prison
#186Recently I thought about the educational structure and I wondered if we couldn't do way better.
My idea was to make it much more like how paid for classes and work are.
Instead of grades, there should be classes happening of various levels at all times. And student should be able to apply for promotions at any point, where if they pass the test, they can get promoted to the next level. Grades should be secret from one another like salaries often are, so students shouldn't feel like they compete with others, but only with themselves. And they should focus on working towards their promotions, with a 1:1 with the teacher where the teacher can tell them what they should focus on next and all to work towards their promotion.
That way everyone can go at their own pace, which can even be a pace that varies from time to time. Students don't feel a competitive pressure. You don't really have "class mates" in the sense that there's much more churn at all time of who is currently in any given lesson. And you get more personalized feedback on how to reach the next level.
Also, schools shouldn't be rated with how well their student performs, but instead by the diff of how much better the students became year over year. Like imagine a fitness studio bragging how their program makes you super fit, but they only accept people who are already super fit to join, doesn't make any sense.
Re: School or Prison
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s unfair to compare CLASP [1] buildings with centuries old stone buildings... The CLASP system was a stopgap measure for cost-effectively building schools for the baby boomer generation given the economic constraints of post-WW2 Britain. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consortium_of_Local_Authorit...
It doesn't look bad because it's cheap, it looks bad because it's inhuman.
There's nothing inhuman about any of the three school pictures here. They're built to a human scale (not too tall, decent amounts of internal room), have generous numbers of windows, and are set in outdoor space with grass and trees.
There are, on the other hand, lots of practical problems with this kind of building. The flat roofs have a tendency to leak, they're decades past their design life, thermal control is poor, they're riddled with asbestos, and a number of other issues. And lots of people think they're ugly. But this doesn't make them inhuman, just a flawed solution to a real-world problem.
I think it's easy to forget just what difficulties the UK was in for building in the 1950s and 1960s. There was a spectacular shortage of housing (a baby boom and the effects of WW2 bombing didn't help) and a chronic shortage of both money and skilled labour for building. There is, bluntly, no way that enough traditional brick and stone buildings could have been put up for there to be enough schools. So you can certainly argue that better cheap and/or mass produced buildings should have been made, or that the aesthetics were bad, but writing off all the architecture without understanding its context is unhelpful.
[Edit: in my view, the most inhuman feature of the images is the fencing, but that is almost certainly not original - security in schools was really stepped up from the 1990s onwards]
Re: School or Prison
#188A 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…
The teacher faces the same problem. Taxi/bus drivers have the same problem.
Re: School or Prison
#189A 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 remember sitting in third grade class, red in the face, hand patiently up in the air for minutes straight, simultaneously crying and pissing myself in my chair while Tiffany pointed and laughed at me with her bright red cheeks! I was a good kid! If I had of robbed or killed someone and been to Juvenile Hall, my pants would probably have been dry.
There is a middle ground between passive and aggressive called assertive. That is what one should aim for.
The world chews up and spits out good kids. I vowed early on that I wouldn't let anyone shit on me again and it really shaped my early life, not necessarily for the better. I overshot assertive by a decent margin.
Fortunately, I eventually settled into a healthy middle ground. I do wonder if there is a method of preparing "good kids" for the world of shit they are about to encounter in a manner that is a net benefit to them (ie. Not scarred or jaded by it). Not that I'm ever having kids.
Re: School or Prison
#190In one of the largest high schools in Texas, we weren't allowed to leave campus, we couldn't even take our lunch out of the double doors and eat our sandwich outside. It's something I absolutely despise about our contemporary culture. I live in Latin America now and envy the kids for getting 45 minutes free at lunch time to hang out outside, socialize, buy from the street vendors that will gather at that time, maybe…
Anecdotally, I've heard of that more at suburban schools where you pretty much have to access and leave the campus via car. At my high school in Chicago (2003-2007, ~2,000 students) we were free to leave the campus at any time and often spent lunch at a nearby hot dog stand or sitting in the park and hanging out. The only restriction was that you had to re-enter through specific entries so they could check school IDs. I think it's because the school is in the middle of the city and very pedestrian friendly. One kid I knew even lived across the street from the school and would go home to make himself some lunch. I know from friends and family that suburban high schools in the Chicagoland area were more strict with their off-campus policies as there wasn't any pedestrian access to the schools. I just think suburban schools don't want traffic jams in the parking lot during every lunch period.