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...
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...