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Comment by lukifer | Hacker News Reader

Foucault is explicitly referring to norms of behavior, not the shapes of buildings:

  - regular chronologies
  - forced labour
  - authorities of surveillance and registration

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Are you sure? I've seen some pretty panoptic school designs, and this IS indeed a shape of building that Foucault focused on...

Here's the chapter of his book about the nature of certain building styles and shapes being important here...

https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.disciplineAndPunish...

Also interesting to talk about, are the ways that the people influenced by Foucault talk about space, area, and architectural design. Deleuze and Guattari had a whole lot to say about all of those topics, and they are one of the principle reasons for Foucaults fame...

I believe it's that they're linked and both arrive out of the same logics of dominion, and authorizing use of dominion over a spaces and people.

Form follows function, I agree.

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.

Maybe not: If he considered those sorts of structures (absent the forced labor) to be inherently bad in some way then I do not understand that point of view.

Where is the forced labor in schools, barracks, hospitals and factories? I understand there are some instances where this might be the case, but generally people go to those places because they want to, or because it offers them a favorable outcome that they're willing to temporarily trade some autonomy for.

You can deconstruct the whole of society and make an argument that all labor exchanged for capital is oppression, that all regular chronologies favored by the dominant culture is oppression, that all authority figures are oppressive etc... But it's difficult to imagine a thriving, post-industrial society not featuring some of those things.

Even looking back in history, people have self-organized into hierarchical, regimented systems. I think a lot of this is just a natural reaction to our environment, which is also dictated by regular chronologies (days, lunar cycle, seasons), necessary labor (biological need for food and shelter) and implicit authority figures (parents).

>but generally people go to those places because they want to, or because it offers them a favorable outcome that they're willing to temporarily trade some autonomy for.

I don't think this is why kids go to school. You go to school because you have to. There is no realistic option not to go. If you don't go, then you'll be forcefully put into a school for troubled kids. Even if you don't consider the above, there is still an enormous social pressure to go to school too.

I wish there were solid alternatives to school.

I hate the current system but I also want my kids to be socialised and have friends.

I'd definitely pay a private company providing "home schooling" and using a different model of education where kids are learning by doing instead of memorising crap and at the same time can share a location with other kids of the same age (+ a few tutor available to unblock kids when needed but not delivering frontal lessons).

Isn’t that basically a Montessori school?

"The Montessori method of education is an educational method developed by Italian physician Maria Montessori. Emphasizing independence, it views children as naturally eager for knowledge and capable of initiating learning in a sufficiently supportive and well-prepared learning environment. It discourages some conventional measures of achievement, such as grades and tests."

You might take a look at the "unschooling" movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling

I don't have any first-hand knowledge of how such initiatives work in practice; but at a high level, it's like home-schooling with more community involvement and socialization, as well as off-site learning experiences. I've also heard of some families who do half-and-half between a formal school environment, and unschooling/homeschooling.

when i am sick at work, then i can take a few days off. (with or without pay). whatever work needs to get done, will be done by someone else, and i join back in without penalty when i am ready

when my kids miss school, they have to catch up the work they missed. if they already struggle then they can't afford to get sick because they will fall to far behind and may not be able to catch up.

so yes, school is forced labor and it's a prison

Ex-primary teacher here. At any one time a certain percentage of kids in the class would be off sick, it was a given. So the curriculum doesn't proceed linearly but more like a helix: it circles around and around the same topics year by year with each child being supported to learn at the level they are - always a broad range in any one class.

So it's in my experience totally untrue to suggest that any child would have to "catch up" any learning missed due to sickness (and also reveals that schools are talking bollocks when they suggest that taking a few days off to go on holiday during termtime will have any noticeable adverse effect, but shhhh)

Yah, catch-up work often feels punitive but it appears to be universally expected by instructors. I'm a MS teacher, and I don't really care (though it does complicate my assessments), but my kids' teachers do really care about every piece of work being turned in.

Sometimes it's ridiculous-- my then-4th grader was taking Algebra I on the side, and had shown mastery on the 4th grade fraction curriculum on a test, but getting the large packet of fraction work that he missed during an absence was considered critically important. :P

> reveals that schools are talking bollocks when they suggest that taking a few days off to go on holiday during termtime

I do think that the kind of attitude that lets you ignore a bit of schooling here and there for a convenient vacation schedule does affect outcomes, though. I teach at a private school, but I think we're both aware of incentives for attendance, the reasons for them, and the areas in which they cause perverse outcomes.

> So it's in my experience totally untrue to suggest that any child would have to "catch up" any learning missed due to sickness (and also reveals that schools are talking bollocks when they suggest that taking a few days off to go on holiday during termtime will have any noticeable adverse effect, but shhhh)

But it does seem true, from the point of view of parents and children. It doesn't matter that the curriculum is helical and revisits the same topics multiple times. It doesn't revisit the same topics multiple time in a single semester, which means the kid doesn't get a second chance to learn a topic within the grading scope, which means they have to catch up or risk a lower grade. As much as we say that it's the education that matters, as much as it should matter - it doesn't. What matters are the grades. At the very least, in my experience, most parents have grade expectations, and the kid will suffer negative consequences this semester if they fall back, even though they may recover by the end of the education level (where again, the final grades are all that matters).

(Even though the immediate pressure may come from the parents, it's in a control loop with the grades, so the school can't pretend this is not happening.)

Of course grades are fairly meaningless in elementary school, unless they are so bad you're needing to repeat a year. Being sick for a few days won't cause that. At that level grades are mostly just feedback to the parents.

As a parent, if my 4th or 6th grader got a lower grade due to missing homework as a result of being sick, it wouldn't concern me.

In high school it starts to matter more due to grades being a component of college admissions, but unless you're targeting really elite schools a couple of days of missed work isn't going to move the needle much. And if you are targeting elite schools, you're already working very hard and including a lot of AP courses and extracuricular activities and you will just buckle down and make up the work.

That doesn't make it a prison: neither another student nor the teacher can step in and learn the material for your child. I don't know what you think would be an appropriate option there.

Also, you may have a job where none of your responsibilities are unique to you, but that's not often the case outside of some types of shift work. If I take a vacation or sick days, I have catching up to do. No one is going to step in for a couple of days and pickup where I left off on a project I've been working on for 3 months.

As for missing school, my kids go to typical mediocre public schools. When a student is struggling, they're given a little extra help. When they miss because they're sick, they're given plenty of time to makeup the work. And if a student is struggling so much that they can't reasonably move on to the next year's more complex material, the school literally devotes and extra year if resources to

Also, you may have a job where none of your responsibilities are unique to you, but that's not often the case outside of some types of shift work.

in that environment how do you take a vacation? sure a planned downtime is easier than an unplanned one but the process is the same.

in a programming team other team members pick up tasks.

if my assistant is away, i may have to do some things myself.

if i am sick, my customers will just have to wait. if i set my deadlines to short, not giving any buffer time, it's my fault.

yes, there may be catch up type work, but usually i am not compelled to work overtime, which is how kids catch up time looks like.

they are forced to catch up on their own time, not in class and they are not given a choice.

montessori designed a way of teaching, where each child learns at their own pace. missed time simply never causes a problem that way

That doesn't mean a student doesn't miss something when they're away from school. Self-paced just changes the timing. The dynamic is not comparable to a work environment where someone else might be able to do the work for you. No one can learn for your child when they are away, and that fact doesn't change with less rigidly structured Montessori schools.

it definetly does mean that they don't miss anything, because the students just resume where they left off without any pressure to speed up.

They still need to actually learn the stuff. That's my point based on your original comment: You're comment was comparing work to school, and that normal schools were bad in some way because at work you could miss time and someone else would step in. I said, repeated, and will say again: learning does not work that way. No one can step in for you. Montessori doesn't change that. It changes the timing and, sure, the direct pressure from the teacher. That doesn't mean there isn't some type of pressure: from the parent, from the other students that are obliged to help in their co-operative learning structure, etc.

I'm not debating the merits of Montessori schools. I'm saying the "missing time" aspect of your comment does not have a good analog from work to learning. That's all.

i am not concerned about who is doing the work, but when it needs to be done.

missing time means, that you need to work overtime to make up for it.

at work this is not normally the case. if the work can't be done by someone else, then it will simply be delayed. the timing changes. same with montessori learning. you will simply delay all your learning by a few days. which is not a problem at all because everyone is learning at their own pace anyways.

contrast that with traditional schooling where overtime is the only way to catch up with your classmates

When i am sick my work piles up.

Kids can actually take free days off. They don't actually have to do everything that was done while they have been away, usually we have done just small portion of it. Kids that struggle just continues struggling and kids that perceive school easy just continue lazying around.

In no way will few days off make you fall behind.

Sure, there's no inevitability, but there can also be ways that make sense.

It might be possible to make a space launch vehicle that's short and squat, or operate a factory without any regular worker hours, but it's going to have some costs compared to our current equilibrium

The definition itself of cost and equilibrium is ideologically defined, but otherwise your point is correct.

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