The basic thesis is that factories, schools, and prisons all share the same goal of enforcing routine, predicable behavior by using constant surveillance, overt violence, and enforced self-discipline.
Self-discipline is such a sinister concept. Beating yourself in to compliance with an externally required norm.
Yeah, but even Fouacalt himself said that he took the principal too far initially.
And while schools can suck (I have loads of experience unfortunately), and there are things that can be compared, like the rigid structure, discipline, uniformity, violence, it's not fully comparable to a prison. And most teenagers on twitter will not be nuanced in their analysis here.
I think Foucault's thesis is more correct now than when it was written. There is now massive, constant surveillance of students. Phones, computers, and social media are all used to track students and control their movement and behaviors. Being outside without a purpose is de-facto illegal in many places and especially for poor and minority kids. The school-to-prison pipeline is a well honed machine for procuring slaves. The slightest disciplinary infractions result in the threat or reality of police violence and incarceration.
It's not like that everywhere, or all the time, but the methods of control and degree of control between schools and prisons have been on a convergent path for decades. Even teachers are subject to massive and oppressive surveillance and oversight to the point that it impedes their ability to teach.
School as we currently know it basically only exists to teach children how to be good workers. Education is a very good thing, but what we have barely counts as education. Examination of historical forces is rare in western schools.
It's also worth keeping in mind that at this point schools are effectively equivalent to locking your child in a box with a 5% chance of the box having a serial killer in it.
My very-privileged suburban high school had barbed-wire fencing and all of its external windows were on the second floor or were too small to get more than a head out of. When they were building it, before they put on the cladding, it legitimately looked like a prison.
One of the best public high schools in the US (although it was a little further down that list when I attended than it is now)! Teenagers are legitimately treated like a bizarre cross between prisoners and livestock here...
This is pretty widely agreed on, though. Precise timekeeping is necessary to regulate the labor of factory workers. We've actually moved past that for many industries; office workers can complete their tasks in widely varying amounts of time, don't need to labor continuously throughout the day, and have productivity and output that are difficult to quantify. Yet capital still requires precise time keeping and attendence, and attempts to impose quantified productivity metrics as though their office workers were on an assembly line.
I chose a thing that sounds silly, but is still true because I wanted to subvert the narrative a little. Sometimes, facilely stupid sounding arguments hide a useful piece of analysis. It's even true of the other arguments. Training bed-times into children absolutely is training them to have their time regimented by capital, regardless of how silly the idea of not making sure kids are asleep at a reasonable time may be. The necessity of showers is imposed, in large part, because of the proximity in which we live and labor, and much of the ritual of showering is little more than an excuse to sell unnecessary cleaning products (which you can take from my cold dead hands, particularly given how rare being physically able to shower is for me sometimes).
These discussions are still worth having despite supposedly being meaningless, because when approached correctly, they always result in more insight in the cultural forces that influence all of us.
See that's a pure culture issue. There are no direct economic issues related to the question of what constitutes nudity and where it is acceptable. In various times and places standards of nudity have varied wildly and have applied differently to rich and poor, lords and vassals, men and women. There's absolute no reason that walking around stark ass naked in fancy boots with expensive tattoos and an expensive exercise regimine couldn't come to be the dominant expression of wealth and high status, while the police are beating the shit out of poor people for showing too much ankle.
"You see this nano-film? It vibrates the filth right off your balls. I dream of an America that is clean, and fresh, and exfoliated, where every man chooses his won scent! That he believes in!
deleted by creator
I wonder what the next weird Twitter anarchist take will be?
Toilets are imperialist, shitting in the nearest river is praxis!
Well, there was that guy arguing that literacy was bad because it enforces hegemony a couple days ago
At least I think it was a few days ago
Time is a mystery to me since I got rid of all my clocks and calendars since measuring things is authoritarian
Schools = prison is definitely the next one in the twitter leftist pipeline
Pretty sure that's already been done
Ahhhh damn.
Next one will be going full Anprim to show solidarity with the global south or something.
Foucalt wrote a whole ass book about that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish
The basic thesis is that factories, schools, and prisons all share the same goal of enforcing routine, predicable behavior by using constant surveillance, overt violence, and enforced self-discipline.
Self-discipline is such a sinister concept. Beating yourself in to compliance with an externally required norm.
Yeah, but even Fouacalt himself said that he took the principal too far initially.
And while schools can suck (I have loads of experience unfortunately), and there are things that can be compared, like the rigid structure, discipline, uniformity, violence, it's not fully comparable to a prison. And most teenagers on twitter will not be nuanced in their analysis here.
I think Foucault's thesis is more correct now than when it was written. There is now massive, constant surveillance of students. Phones, computers, and social media are all used to track students and control their movement and behaviors. Being outside without a purpose is de-facto illegal in many places and especially for poor and minority kids. The school-to-prison pipeline is a well honed machine for procuring slaves. The slightest disciplinary infractions result in the threat or reality of police violence and incarceration.
It's not like that everywhere, or all the time, but the methods of control and degree of control between schools and prisons have been on a convergent path for decades. Even teachers are subject to massive and oppressive surveillance and oversight to the point that it impedes their ability to teach.
:foucault-madness:
School as we currently know it basically only exists to teach children how to be good workers. Education is a very good thing, but what we have barely counts as education. Examination of historical forces is rare in western schools.
It's also worth keeping in mind that at this point schools are effectively equivalent to locking your child in a box with a 5% chance of the box having a serial killer in it.
They kinda are, tho... And not just visually, although also visually.
Poor inner city schools have bars on the windows and barbed wire fencing in some places.
My very-privileged suburban high school had barbed-wire fencing and all of its external windows were on the second floor or were too small to get more than a head out of. When they were building it, before they put on the cladding, it legitimately looked like a prison.
america is wild
One of the best public high schools in the US (although it was a little further down that list when I attended than it is now)! Teenagers are legitimately treated like a bizarre cross between prisoners and livestock here...
Formal timekeeping. The clock exists as a shared measure, a necessary precondition of extortion and command.
This is pretty widely agreed on, though. Precise timekeeping is necessary to regulate the labor of factory workers. We've actually moved past that for many industries; office workers can complete their tasks in widely varying amounts of time, don't need to labor continuously throughout the day, and have productivity and output that are difficult to quantify. Yet capital still requires precise time keeping and attendence, and attempts to impose quantified productivity metrics as though their office workers were on an assembly line.
I chose a thing that sounds silly, but is still true because I wanted to subvert the narrative a little. Sometimes, facilely stupid sounding arguments hide a useful piece of analysis. It's even true of the other arguments. Training bed-times into children absolutely is training them to have their time regimented by capital, regardless of how silly the idea of not making sure kids are asleep at a reasonable time may be. The necessity of showers is imposed, in large part, because of the proximity in which we live and labor, and much of the ritual of showering is little more than an excuse to sell unnecessary cleaning products (which you can take from my cold dead hands, particularly given how rare being physically able to shower is for me sometimes).
These discussions are still worth having despite supposedly being meaningless, because when approached correctly, they always result in more insight in the cultural forces that influence all of us.
deleted by creator
See that's a pure culture issue. There are no direct economic issues related to the question of what constitutes nudity and where it is acceptable. In various times and places standards of nudity have varied wildly and have applied differently to rich and poor, lords and vassals, men and women. There's absolute no reason that walking around stark ass naked in fancy boots with expensive tattoos and an expensive exercise regimine couldn't come to be the dominant expression of wealth and high status, while the police are beating the shit out of poor people for showing too much ankle.
Unironically yeah
deleted by creator
this tbh
Toilets are a hierarchy, squatting over a hole in the floor is equality
This is anti Asia
"anarchist"
A lot of them odd hun
senator armstrong but he just wants you to be hygienic
Nano showers son
Lmao
deleted by creator
I see u 👁️
I replied to the wrong comment dang it all :ooooooooooooooh:
:Bwaaa:
Muh gosh dang comments bobbeh!
deleted by creator
Again lmao
MOM IT KEEPS HAPPENING
This owl has fat
thumbswingtipsMOM HE'S BULLYING ME :bird-screm-2:
"You see this nano-film? It vibrates the filth right off your balls. I dream of an America that is clean, and fresh, and exfoliated, where every man chooses his won scent! That he believes in!
I'm trying to turn "played college ball" into "wash your balls" but I can't get the phrasing right