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School or Prison

schoolprison.com

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Re: School or Prison

#191

Post by giantg2 »

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…

School was pretty good about letting kids go to the bathroom. I only remember one or two times that people were denied (they were misbehaving).

There was one time a kid got denied wrongfully because the teacher thought he was part of a group that was causing trouble right before that. He had a half-empty Gatorade bottle in his backpack from lunch... he was sitting in the back of class and chugged it while the teacher wasn't looking. He then refilled it with a different yellow liquid, if you know what I mean. I'm a bit surprised the teacher didn't catch him and that nobody freaked out and snitched.

Re: School or Prison

#192

Post by giantg2 »

So... what's the point of the site?

It's just a bunch of buildings. The onea I saw could be labeled just about anything (hospital, office, court, etc).

Re: School or Prison

#193

Post by pvorb »

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…

A few months ago I heard of a school in Berlin that removed toilet paper from the bathrooms and forced kids to go to the janitor to get their three sheets of toilet paper per day. And as icing on the cake the janitor didn't acknowledge that teenage girls need more paper than boys.

This story aired in TV and probably it's no longer the case. Also it likely bends the truth a bit, but nevertheless this is so unsettling and absurd that I wanted to share it.

Re: School or Prison

#194

Post by HeavenFox »

Aunche wrote: post #182

In 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,...

That isn’t unique to schools though. In older buildings outside of gated communities, they are extremely common in first floor and second floor apartments too.

Re: School or Prison

#195

Post by mrslave »

> common etiquette even allowed for a bit of food if it wasn't noisy to eat or have a powerful smell

And then you graduated, started catching the train to your new job, discovered that many people do not reciprocate this standard, and there's split drink, empty bottles, and undesirable aromatics on every train.

Re: School or Prison

#196

Post by souplesse »

philwelch wrote: post #10
joe_the_user wrote: post #2

It's part of the larger situation that the buildings created by large bureaucracies all look about the same.

It’s an architectural style called “brutalism”, which has the predominant aesthetic of “a boot stamping on a human face forever”.

Feelings on brutalism aside, only one[0] of the ten buildings could reasonably be called categorized as such.

Boring? Yes. Cold and functional? Sure. Just not brutalist.

Brutalist architecture is often considered soulless, but soullessness (in and of itself) !== brutalism.

[0] https://res.cloudinary.com/schoolprison/10_wwfagw.jpg (which was a school)

Re: School or Prison

#197

Post by cortesoft »

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 know it is bad for kids, but it really sucked as a teacher, too.

I substitute taught for a few years after college, and you can't leave the classroom at all except during your prep period. It was really bad some days.

Re: School or Prison

#198

Post by kristopolous »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #176
hombre_fatal wrote: post #162

In 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…

Our principal refused to let students leave campus, as a student had gotten in a car wreck over lunch and died at a previous school. So, there's some logic there. They are nominally responsible for you during school hours.

I call this "outlier driven policy"; one single instance of some thing happening some where at some time within the past 100 years means that everyone for perpetuity has to follow some new rule because the lim(x -> 0) risk is simply too much.

For instance, there was one person, 2 decades ago, flying out of france, who hid a bomb in his shoes so today we are all still taking off our shoes, all of us, each time, on every flight. Splendid.

It's a completely reactionary narrative driven policy that really illustrates the probabilistic illiteracy, cost/benefit illiteracy, lack of critical thinking ... it's like we've taken the structure of folksy tales like "one child did that and they poked their eye out" and are all like "ok, let's make official policy around this"

This is how all the fun park equipment has been dismantled and replaced with things no child past the age of 4 or so would ever find appealing because the existence of a non-zero risk, regardless of how small that is, are all treated equivalently with their volumes cranked to 11.

Re: School or Prison

#199

Post by ianleeclark »

ineedasername wrote: post #110
lukifer wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Foucault is explicitly referring to norms of behavior, not the shapes of buildings: - regular chronologies - forced labour - authorities of surveillance and registration

Outside of "forced labor", just about any large building is going to have people & operations that occur on fixed schedules and have some degree of security.

And now you understand Foucault.

Re: School or Prison

#200

Post by jokethrowaway »

jamespwilliams wrote: post #46

In the UK our prisons often look nicer than our (state) schools. Many of our prisons are quite ancient, whereas many of our state schools are 1960s monstrosities. For example: * https://hidden-london.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/geograp... vs https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/James_Ho... * https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article1185483.ece/ALT... vs https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/com…

I find most building in the UK to be either extremely futuristic (think London modern skyscrapers) and out of space, concrete blobs or houses with brick facades.

That's subjective, but I can't say I like any of them

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