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Comment by 0xcde4c3db | Hacker News Reader

The culture in many US schools is an adversarial mess where the teachers, administration, and students are in constant conflict over things that should be non-issues. There's often a sense that the primary purpose of school is to grind down any resistance to authority. Comparisons between school and prison aren't typical, but they're certainly not unheard of. Some schools have been known to lock/chain all side/rear exits during the school day to stop students from sneaking out (generally in blatant violation of fire code). Multiple school districts have had to settle lawsuits related to students being strip-searched.

In this culture the kind of system described by the article wasn't just predictable, it was utterly inevitable.

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I grew up viewing school as prison. I was part of a program in elementary school which meant that I traveled to other schools regularly. My elementary and high schools were quite nice, but my middle school and the schools that I traveled to were very prison-like. The windows are small, and covered in metal bars or thick metal meshing.

Using the bathroom required permission that was often denied. Peeing between classes often meant penalties for being tardy (in middle/high school where you had 5 minutes to get between classes which may be a 4 minute walk apart, and teachers always had that one last thing to say). My middle school banned shoelaces for a while because of gang violence. I had a Spanish teacher who regularly handed out negative grades on tests (your grade would have been better if you hadn't showed up and taken a 0 on the test). I had a different spanish teacher who took it upon herself to regularly humiliate students who were doing poorly and lecture us about how we could never expect to get anywhere in life.

It wasn't all bad. I had a fantastic chemistry teacher and a great physics teacher. But there was a lot of bad.

"The windows are small, and covered in metal bars or thick metal meshing."

That's one thing I don't get in the US. The schools really look like prisons. Why not have windows and daylight?

I don’t know, but a lot of public sector buildings seem to be built in this way. Looming monolithic structures with little to no natural light, and grimy linoleum flooring. Visit your local city hall or similar. It’s weird because I’ve not experienced the same in the UK, where government buildings are usually (ignoring the beautiful historic ones) built more like any other modern office.

Much of the the US was built up in the 1960s. Architecture was brutal and hasn’t aged well.

My high school was designed by an architectural firm that litterly designed prisons for the state.

As was mine.

A neighboring school to my high school actually was a women's prison before it was repurposed as a high school.

That said, the architecture was actually quite nice, with lots of natural light and open space.

It was the ubiquitous architectural style mid-century. Combined with crime wave that has long since crashed.

>The windows are small, and covered in metal bars or thick metal meshing

Shouldn't that be banned by fire hazard regulations?

There seems to have been some disconnect where we’ve just decided that young people have no longer got any rights. For most cases your barometer for treating children ought to be “would I as an adult be okay being treated this way”. Children need more protection than adults, not less. Schools should be a place where children feel safe, not a place where they feel locked up. It’s no surprise that there’s a school-to-prison pipeline in the US when some schools resemble prisons so closely.

>There seems to have been some disconnect where we’ve just decided that young people have no longer got any rights.

Segregation happened. Much like racial divides, it's easier to see people you aren't exposed to on a daily basis as something less than human. That, and when people are expected to be less than human, they start acting like it (the lack of opportunity for personal development directly delays when it happens).

Children, of course, have it worse, because they don't know (and some never really figure it out) that they're getting screwed; the foundation of fighting for rights is knowing you should have them in the first place.

And while there may have been a good reason for this in the past (1910s industry was very far from being a pleasant place to work), safety regulations and the increased number of service/knowledge jobs relative to the more unpleasant ones (as well as safety regulations where applicable) as well as increased automation would make workplace apprenticeship programs much more viable. The political will (of the people who have rights) can't be changed unless they see those who they oppress like themselves, and showing that they can accomplish objectively useful things (not schoolwork) is a good way to do that.

Of course, the very task of creating programs that make children useful is significant, and we figure that school isn't that unpleasant for most, so [corporate humanity] will do nothing to change their status. We won't teach the children dissatisfied by the current system that there's something they can do about it either, because that would destabilize the system as it stands.

>Schools should be a place where children feel safe, not a place where they feel locked up.

The two are much more similar than you realize. The feeling of being locked up directly stems from the complete elimination of risk (i.e. the feeling of safety). And a school with no playground and no technical subjects where students are seen and not heard is a perfectly safe place, much like societies where the concept of risk is antithetical to the concept that individuals only exist to serve said society tend to have less violence but never actually prosper. Development requires risk.

I wonder if this might be a result of architectonic decisions. What if the architecture of the school made people in it behave more prison-like?

I think that another aspect of the us school system is the stampede during the breaks. Too many people moving at once.

One thing that sadly seems to apply is that despite all claims of justice and equality it is really all about power in terms of how societies actually judge and treat people - and children lack power. Society abolished corporal punishment in prisons before we abolished it in schools - how is that for being utterly fucked up?

Not to mention the unidirectionality of aging - once you age out you never have to worry about being subject to the restrictions. If we applied the same standards to minors we would have a maximum voting age because once you get to say 90 your bloc is judged 'statistically not fully capable'.

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