The underlying principles of schools and prisons
By: Astrid Gothard
At 7:50 am, the halls of Barton Hills Elementary School are practically crawling with students. In the kindergarten wing, tiny hands reach up as high as they can to place miniature backpacks on metal hooks. The backpacks are nearly every color imaginable, with patterns that seem to perfectly capture the free-spirited whimsy of kids just too little to be pushed back with the devastating information of cruelty and hate that our world carries with it. Or, maybe not. Right next to the backpack hooks, the door to the classroom stands heavy and intimidating, with a door handle high and hard for the little kids to turn. Inside, a teacher armed with rewards and punishments maintains order. Behind every standard elementary and middle school, the underlying methods of discipline and control bear a striking resemblance to the methods and theories of a very different place: prison.
Schools and prisons are fundamentally different. The primary goal of the first is to educate young people and prep them with the information they will need to make their way in the world. The latter is used to punish people who don’t follow the rules of the game we call society, and keep the most dangerous ones out of sight and out of mind, away from the people who play fair. Two very different types of people are involved: the ones who still have their entire path ahead of them, and those who have stumbled off the path that society sets for them. But for some reason, despite these differences, control and predictability are managed very similarly.
“In both schools and prisons, compliance is the goal,” says Dr. Marilee Ransom, who has worked as a lawyer in prisons and a literacy teacher in both prisons and schools. “This isn’t so much of a fundamentally bad proposition in maximum-security prisons, but is a completely backward notion in elementary and middle schools.”
So what are the effects of training and educating some of the youngest members of our society in a place that has the same underlying principles as the place the so-called worst members of our society are kept? To understand why, you must first understand the methods of control.
In the book Discipline & Punish: the Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault, says “A meticulous observation of detail, and at the same time a political awareness of these small things, for the control and use of all sorts of people, emerge through the classical age bearing with them a whole set of techniques, a whole corpus of methods and knowledge, descriptions, plans and data.” This set of standards for control was originally meant for control in militaries but soon spread to prisons, schools, and even hospitals. The first standard is enclosure, which states that, for control, “the group of people you wish to be controlled must be kept in a certain place, separate from the outside going-ons of the world.” Examples of this include walls around military bases, and separate wards in hospitals. Prisons clearly represent this, but schools do too. The majority of schools have fences around them, and the outside doors are made of heavy metal and lock automatically. Yes, the primary purpose of this is to keep suspicious or threatening people out, but it also keeps students in.
“When I was in fourth grade, I made a really stupid mistake on my homework. My teacher showed it to the rest of the class as an example of what happens when you rush through your homework. Everyone laughed at me, one kid called me stupid, and I just stood up and ran out of the classroom. I was only ten.” says Kelsy Ingram, a seventh-grader at O’Henry Middle School, who went to elementary school at Barton Hills Elementary. “I ran down the hall and heard my teacher yelling for me to come back. As I ran, some other teachers looked out of their classrooms and saw me running. Before I even got out of the first-and-fourth-grade wing, the assistant principal and the counselor had already been called and came out into the hall, yelling at me to stop. I got to the front doors and tried to pull them open, but they were locked. The office had already been called and had locked the front doors from being opened from the inside, something I hadn’t even thought they could do. I shouldn’t have tried to run out of school, but it was creepy, how fast they caught me. That’s when I realized that I really couldn’t leave school whenever I wanted to.”
While a funny story, this shows how much control the school really has over the whereabouts of students. While it may seem easy to leave when the school day is over, it is nearly impossible to leave without the teacher’s permission. Though this overall is a good thing, especially for student’s safety, it is still concerning how much control this puts in the teacher’s hands.
The second method of control is partitioning. In Discipline & Punish, this is described as “keeping individuals separate from one-another. Avoiding group work that requires conversation as much as possible, and mixing up the needed groups as much as possible, to limit possible alliances and group plots against authority,” Certainly the last point is a bit extreme for schools, but group work is limited, and students are almost always put in groups with people they are not close friends with. In prisons, this is very true. The most important example of this is the solitary cell. Separating misbehaving prisoners from human interaction can limit the amount of trouble they can get into, but can also mess with a prisoner’s mind and possibly their humanity. Humans have evolved as group animals. We thrive off of interaction. Taking that away puts the prisoner’s very humanity in the hands of the guards. This, though very extreme, is definitely part of control. In schools, it isn’t anywhere near this extreme, but having to power to separate friends, at least for in-class time, certainly gives the teacher a substantial amount of power.
The third and last method is rank. Described as “separating people into categories based on performance and compliance. This is necessary for keeping people separated, as in partitioning, but also putting power over privilege, pride, and responsibility in the hands of the authority,”
In prisons, this is represented in varying sentence lengths and differing levels of security between prisons. By separating the people who broke minor rules from the people who broke extreme ones, they are categorizing people, giving less control over the very worst. As shortening and lengthening sentences is a decision made by prison authorities, this is putting power over freedom in the authorities’ hands, giving them possibly the highest amount of control possible. In schools, rank can be represented in grades, report cards, and seating arrangements, giving students less or more respect and even freedom based on behavior and performance. “If you listen to the teacher and get your homework done on time, you get to go to the restroom during class time, you get to have your water bottle on your desk, in middle school you get to have your phone in your pocket, instead of in your backpack, and you even get to leave class about five minutes earlier than everyone else. The bad kids have to stay and clean,” says Kelsy Ingram. While Kelsy notes that these extreme rewards for compliance were given only by her fourth-grade teacher and a few of her middle school teachers, she claims that all teachers have some sort of reward system in place for the most compliant students. Other students interviewed agree that almost every single teacher in standard elementary and middle schools have some sort of reward system for the children who comply with the teacher’s and school’s rules.
The message this is trying to give? If you follow our rules and are compliant, you will win some of your control back. This is certainly a concern. Control and compliance have become such a big deal that some might argue that schools have lost sight of the most important goal: teaching.
While extreme control in schools is problematic at best, extreme control in prisons is necessary, right? Well, yes. But are prisons effective in general? When asked if she thought prisons were effective, Dr. Ransom replied, “I don’t think they’re effective. I think as a deterrent, they’re pretty terrible. There is no research that shows that they are effective as either a deterrent or a rehabilitation. And it’s up to you and your generation to fix it,” she added. Coming from somebody who has worked with prisoners for a long time, this should be taken seriously. Without the benefits, prisons are just a way to exile the rule-breakers of society, take away their freedom and keep them out of the mind and sight of the people who do follow the rules society sets for us. So why are we treating our school systems and children like this? More importantly, what are the effects?
More confident students can get angry with this extreme control, and become irritable and rebellious. At Barton Hills Elementary, highly prized medals are given to students at the start of each quarter, the first round praising honesty, the second praising helpfulness, the third praising communication skills, and the fourth praising leadership. “Who do these medals really go to?” Kelsy Ingram’s little brother, a fifth-grader named Malcolm says. “The tattletales, the suck-ups, the teacher’s pets, and the bossy kids!” Malcolm didn’t get a medal this year.
While the terms Malcolm uses are extreme, the current methods of control do tend to create kids who will do anything for the teacher’s praise, including telling on their peers at any opportunity they get, as in the case of the tattletales. Earning the teacher’s liking can even give kids a sense of power, possibly contributing to the population of “bossy kids”, if that means kids who consistently order their peers around without considering their feelings or opinions.
Less confident students, especially the young ones, can begin to see complying as the most important way to succeed in school and may lose any confidence they already have. A kindergartener named Eva (she didn’t know how to spell her last name) who attends Barton Hills Elementary School, said that her twin sister Mila comes home crying most Mondays because she didn’t get to sit in the ‘comfy chair’. The ‘comfy chair’ is actually a large beanbag, kept by the teacher to reward the quietest, most polite student of the week. Little Mila apparently has become caught up in the want to be good enough for her teacher that she doesn’t ever speak up in class, for fear of getting the wrong answer or talking too loudly or forgetting to raise her hand, all of which would lose her a spot in both the beanbag and the teacher’s list of favorites. By giving the most compliant student a highly-valued reward in front of the class, the teacher is lifting up that child as a role model. To the students, this competition for favorite has become more important to them then learning, and the teacher is encouraging this. What are the negative consequences? Just ask Mila.
While rules and boundaries are important, children should be able to feel like they are at school to learn, not to be controlled. Society, instead of training the youngest members to love learning, has actually been training them to be quiet, compliant, mindless robots, and punishing the ones who don’t want to be. In trying to maintain control over the youngest members of society, we have lost sight of everything schools are supposed to stand for. We must find a way to maintain order in a way that encourages learning, giving students the freedom to be curious and thoughtful. And those little kindergarteners, with their kaleidoscope of backpacks? We have to change the way our school systems work. Not for us, but for them.
Bibliography
Kesly Ingram
Malcolm Ingram
Eva [last name unknown]
Dr. Marilee Ransom
Discipline & Punish by Michel Foucault
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