been thinking about systems that replicate prisons a lot lately and i'm wondering to what extent traditional american schools emulate carceral ideology. the school to prison pipeline is absolutely real and i see it distinctly when i'm collaborating with other teachers at my elementary school. i notice a lot of the ways they act towards students are ways doctors acted towards me when i was in a psychiatric ward, they're condescending and controlling and irreceptive to feedback when the students advocate for themselves (all factors heavily associated with prison environments). approaching any child as a "problem" is not going to do anything but dysregulate them and cause them to lash out at you because they do not feel safe. it is always always always always ALWAYS about safety. if a child comes up to you and says something you think is rude it is because of either the environment they live in or the environment you are creating for them and neither reason should be strictly punished, they should be treated with curiosity about how you can make the environment more fair to them. listening to the children and treating them equitably is the ONLY successful way you can create an environment that fully facilitates their growth and learning
in reply to @ladytimpani's post:
youll have to search out your own sources but this shit runs deep, from a cultural background of christian corporal punishment to a lot of schools and prisons being designed by the same architects during the new deal era and after.
and, well, these days we have schools with armed police and metal detectors and surveillance as a norm, so,
Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labor, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?
--Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, translated 1995, originally published 1975