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.
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.