Basbøll nails it, with his characteristic realistic-but-not-cynical clarity:
When Oscar Wilde said that “suffering is one very long moment” he was serving two year’s of hard labor in prison. Bentham’s utilitarian archictectures nowithstanding, it’s important to keep in mind that school is, not only not prison, it is the opposite of prison. “School” comes from the Greek word for “spare time, leisure, rest, ease; idleness.” . . . it is nothing like a prison, except that it walls us off, for a time, from the ordinary business of living. Wilde’s suffering was unbearable because his respite from this business was not chosen freely. . . . The trick is not so see your time at university as “one very long moment” but to “divide it by seasons”, by semesters, by weeks, and days and hours. . . .
As Chesterton might have said, cynicism is the realism of fools.
Having done time in each type of institution, I wouldn’t say they are opposite. Not identical, but not even close to opposite.
Yes, all oppositions like this are relative. I was trying to emphasize that the walls of a school free you from what the walls of a prison bar you from.
I found this to be a very poor blog post by Basbøll. Even if school in ancient Greece lived up to its name, there is no guarantee that school has not drifted from its etymological roots in the intervening 2,000 years or so. What’s more, he seems to conflate “school” (commonly understood to be the system of mandatory primary/secondary education with intense restrictions on student behavior) with the experience of a university student (an elective tertiary position with comparatively little adult supervision) or even a scholar (that’s just a job). Hardly any university student, except perhaps those subject to invasive and pedagogically bankrupt e-proctoring software, considers themself inside of a panopticon. So, all he has accomplished is to debunk a point that no one has made.
Yes. An obvious but crucial distinction. Federal prison felt a lot like public K-12 school but very little like Harvard.
Adede:
I guess Thomas can respond directly, but I’m guessing that he’s responding to things his students have said. I doubt that it’s “a point that no one has made.” I guess you do have a good point, though, that Thomas’s post would be stronger if he’d give some examples of settings where students or others have said to him that school is like prison.
Maybe it was Foucault
https://i.redd.it/3bsmt7wh3m611.jpg
I suppose if you have never felt any resentment of the university as a student or a scholar then my post will not resonate with you. I am genuinely happy for you. My post is aimed at people who need a little reminder.
I felt a LOT of resentment from about 4th grade to 12th. As Michael Weissman says above: “Federal prison felt a lot like public K-12 school but very little like Harvard.”
The most common “school is like prison” complaint that I’ve heard is about public K-12 school, and generally comes from people outside the “core” of the distribution of skills (those who are doing poorly and never catch up, or those who are very academic and are constantly dragged behind). I could easily have graduated after 10th grade and entered a City College academically. It’s a path I plan to encourage my kids to consider. In 6th and 7th grade they both currently test at about 12th grade reading and math levels. There’s plenty they are socially not ready for in city college, but by 10th grade I can’t imagine they won’t be incredibly bored in high school.
So much self-pity in these posts.
MW: “Having done time in each type of institution, I wouldn’t say they are opposite. Not identical, but not even close to opposite.”
Anon: “I could easily have graduated after 10th grade and entered a City College academically.”
Boo-hoo you two
Doesn’t this division happen more or less automatically, since time at a university is highly structured? (semesters, each of which have a coursework and an exam period, and are punctuated by breaks etc). If anything, experiencing university as “one very long moment” would be what requires effort (at least for me).
Personally, what made university a great experience for me was choice. I had some choice in secondary school about what to study, but that was very small compared to the freedom of deciding what courses to take at university.
Tamas:
Yes, I agree. I think that Thomas would say this is a positive feature of the way school is structured, and he wants students to recognize that this fractal structuring is indeed a good thing.
Yes, and it’s important to appropriate that structure, internalize it deliberately, not to see it as something that has been imposed on you.
Isn’t the perceived prison-ness of school determined largely by the extent to which you enjoy it relative to whatever else you could be doing?
If you like learning in structured environments, have no trouble sitting still to pay attention to lectures (or conspire with teachers to not pay attention but not disrupt class), have friends with whom you socialize throughout the day, enjoy the provided lunches, find the material appropriately easy, etc. AND you have a dysfunctional home life, don’t live near any of those friends, lack access to resources school provides, etc. school may feel more a reprieve than a prison.
But if you prefer independent and self-guided learning or no learning at all, dislike sitting still in class, lack friends at school, eat better at home, find the material too difficult or “too easy”, and at home you live close to friends or else interact with friends primarily through online spaces, spend most of your time running about outside, etc. school may feel a denial of the things you value in life.
If I were forced to pick things up and put them down in the context of a labor camp without rest, I’d feel much more imprisoned than if I were more gently encouraged to do the same in the context of a powerlifting gym. But I like picking things up and putting them down. If I were forced to do something I did not like, like jigsaw puzzles, I might dislike it a lot more than an avid jigsaw puzzler, regardless of how gently the suggestion were posed.
Nik:
Yes, this relates very well to what Thomas is saying. I recommend you read his whole post, not just the little bit I quoted!
Guilty as charged (and thus perhaps deserving of prison — or more schooling). Clicking through, I do like the framing of school as a clearing, a making of space for learning and exploration, at least in the privileged, modern condition where it’s considered a public and common good. I’ll chat with folks with positions ranging from the Caplan-y “Case against Education” to “compulsory K-12 education is a half-step above slavery, and often less preferable” but to me it’s always seemed that the *work* environment is far more inherently prone to coercion: do your job or face destitution. At least with school your basic needs are more often than not met unconditionally! Chunking is also a useful productivity tool, and noting the variety of everyday life does make the passage of time more satisfying (I’ve found that travel abroad, where every day you meet new people and see new things, yields the most “how long ago was that? Two weeks? Felt like ages!”, but regularly learning new things takes a respectable second).
But I think I’d still hesitate to equate “leisure, rest, ease, idleness” with the actual practice of schooling. Not everyone desires the academic life or cares for the standard curriculum, and for those who don’t school may fall closer to prison on the prison meadow spectrum. As other commenters noted, I think it’s also a bit ambiguous whether we’re speaking of *all* schooling, post-secondary schooling (where social expectation might still make the process feel less than elective), some platonic ideal of schooling where we wrap our minds in togas and debate lofty philosophies on the agora, or what. Even as someone who broadly loved school from kindergarten through postdoc, I still gnashed my teeth at the occasional lousy teacher and “busywork”, and would likely have found myself in the “school is prison” camp had all my experiences felt like my worst, and undoubtedly that’s the case for some.
Consider the problem of writing a 1000-word essay. Many university students suffer vaguely through “one very long moment” up to the deadline. My advice (and my very detailed instruction, if requested) is just to write the 5-7 pararaphs 20-30 minutes at a time over two or three days, while minding your sleep, diet, exercise, and social obligations. Never see it as “busywork”. Try always, as best as you can, to see each paragraph as a little labor of love. Give yourself time to enjoy it.
Along something of a tangent, I think it’s worthwhile to keep in mind that in our society schools largely function as a machine for perpetuating the class status quo.
I’ve also heard the primary purpose of (American) primary and secondary schooling is to respectively provide free daycare for parents and to keep teenage boys off the streets where they’d inevitably band together into gangs and wreak havoc. But I’m not sure if those are even later-order effects, much less the main reason for why as a society we encourage schooling. Is perpetuating class divisions just due to segregation into ritzy private schools where senators’ sons can exclusively mingle with doctors’ daughters, or would you say it’s present across all (public) schooling? I usually see education (both higher and otherwise) described as a key driver of social mobility, with caveats (e.g. https://www.brookings.edu/research/thirteen-economic-facts-about-social-mobility-and-the-role-of-education/, https://www.aei.org/higher-education-and-social-mobility/, https://riseprogramme.org/blog/education_increase_social_mobility, etc.), so would be curious to hear more.
It’s worth considering that the very design of our educational paradigm was largely and explicitly to train workers to work efficiently in a hierarchical workplace.
Sure, in terms of intent or goal, there’s far more in play than simply perpetuating class status quo. And yes, fair enough that education is associated with class mobility. But it’s a mixed bag for sure. In general, we can predict educational outcomes by looking at someone’s class background.
I once worked in a very fancy private school. Kissinger sent his kids there, IIRC. In my estimation, there wasn’t much in particular that distinguished the educational experience there as compared to that of other less prestigious schools where I had worked, and yet, wealthy parents would get their kids on the waiting list practically while they were still in utero.
Working though the elementary and middle school, and graduating the high school, was like getting your ticket stamped to go to a prestigious college, and to then obtain employment at a prestigious workplace.
Certainly there were elements of the pipeline to affluence that existed beyond the walls of the school, explicitly, but I’d say certainly the educational paradigm along with the embedded social structure of the schooling itself was also part of the pipeline.
I’ve also worked in countries where the structure is even more explicit. You test coming out of high school, and based on that test you’re admitted to college organized into a very tight hierarchical taxonomy. One score on your test and you go to college #2. Do a little better and you go to college #1. Ironically, at least a couple of decades ago, once in college the students didn’t work very hard at all. Just getting into the particular rank of college, in and of itself, determined the future career trajectory.
So I’d say that our schools are far from the only factor that perpetuates the existing class status quo, and perpetuating the existing status quo is not the singular function – but yeah, I do think that effectively, that is largely a function of our schools – and that function is largely reflected in the characteristics of the methodological and pedagogical paradigms in themselves. If the function is to be shifted more towards operationalizing class mobility, it will require some major restructuring of the common pedagogical paradigm (I. E., moving towards assessing students on individual movement more so than judging them through comparison and ranking against others, emphasizing intrinsic rather than extrinsic evaluation processes, etc.)
There is an unfortunate aspect where students of our schooling system tend (at less more than we’d like?) to look at education as a passive process where you look to do what you’re told to do as closely as instructed as possible. If you don’t follow those rules, you are considered individually deficient. That characteristic has a toll.
I think that came across more negative than I actually view the situation.
Education is hard. Really hard.
Especially in a society with powerful elements that don’t particularly respect education, or at least stand in opposition to centrally organized education – despite the role that centrally organized education has played in building society and enabling class mobility.
Yeah, education is hard and I don’t mean to imply otherwise.
Sociology can ruin your enjoyment of anything. The point of my post was very much not to see yourself as the raw materials of a machine that largely perpetuates the status quo. It may be the aggregate result of education. That doesn’t mean you should experience your schooling in those terms.
I agree.
Just sayin’ that for many students it doesn’t work that way, and it’s useful to think about why.
On the Chesteron “quote,” are you implying that it’s credited to Chesterton but its provenance is suspect, or that it’s the kind of thing that Chesterton might have said if the situation had come up at the time?
Sorry for the digression, but I’m particularly interested in things Chesterton didn’t quite say so the statement fascinated me. :)
J:
No, it was just something that came to me when I was reading Basbøll’s post. I thought it was the kind of thing that Chesterton might have said, partly because it has an air of paradox (similar to the Chestertonian principle that extreme skepticism is a form of credulity), partly because it fits into Chesterston’s general attitude of social conservatism (not necessarily that he’s a fan of schooling, more that he’s sometimes opposed to what one might call a fashionable cynicism, and partly because it’s a twist on the saying “anti-semitism is the socialism of fools.” Chesterton himself was famously anti-semitic so I’d imagine he’d like to turn that around. So for all those reasons I liked the pseudo-attribution.
For the most part, I liked both elementary school and high school (as well as college and graduate school). But I realize that my background was not typical of all students in my schools. Still, most did seem to be accepting rather than resentful of how or what they were taught in school. One thing that was relevant to my attitude toward school was that my dad was an engineer, and my mother was an elementary school teacher before she married and had kids. They didn’t talk down to us (me, an older sister, and an older brother), and tolerated our asking questions about what, why, and how. And my sibs also sometimes “taught” me things. I remember that we had a blackboard, and once they used it to tell me about what a “google” and a “googleplex” were. I also remembered, as I got older, feeling sorry for kids whose families were not as “learning friendly” as mine. For example, my mom read to us, as we sat next to her and followed the words she was reading aloud. That was how we learned to read (at least, my brother and I — my sister was extremely near-sighted, and didn’t get glasses until past the normal age for learning how to read.
Actually, they taught you “googol” and “googolplex”.
Russ,
I guess the spelling doesn’t matter if it’s got the right number of zeroes.
The history is more interesting than that, I think. This is from https://graphics.stanford.edu/~dk/google_name_origin.html :
Origin of the name “Google”
From time to time I read or hear stories of the origin of the search engine and company name “Google” that are incorrect, which prompts me to write this brief account, based on my understanding of the genesis of the name. The source of my information is my friends and colleagues from Wing 3B of the Gates Computer Science Building at Stanford University, where Google was born.
In 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin called their initial search engine “BackRub,” named for its analysis of the web’s “back links.” Larry’s office was in room 360 of the Gates CS Building, which he shared with several other graduate students, including Sean Anderson, Tamara Munzner, and Lucas Pereira. In 1997, Larry and his officemates discussed a number of possible new names for the rapidly improving search technology. Sean recalls the final brainstorming session as occurring one day during September of that year.
Sean and Larry were in their office, using the whiteboard, trying to think up a good name – something that related to the indexing of an immense amount of data. Sean verbally suggested the word “googolplex,” and Larry responded verbally with the shortened form, “googol” (both words refer to specific large numbers). Sean was seated at his computer terminal, so he executed a search of the Internet domain name registry database to see if the newly suggested name was still available for registration and use. Sean is not an infallible speller, and he made the mistake of searching for the name spelled as “google.com,” which he found to be available. Larry liked the name, and within hours he took the step of registering the name “google.com” for himself and Sergey (the domain name registration record dates from September 15, 1997).
Well, as I mentioned above, my sister was a poor speller.
I am a bit surprised that as yet, no one has brought up the notion that school, prison or not, was effectively denied to certain segments of society. School integration was very much in the news in the last century and today instead, the issue seems to be how to defend/fortify the building from deranged intruders. And, let us not forget the other current hot button, avoiding uncomfortable examples in elementary mathematics.
If a school is residential, it, like a prison, is a Goffmanian “total institution”. They are not opposites but points on a continuum.