Are there any differences between Schools vs Prisons?
“School is Prison”
“There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.” ~ William Glasser
“We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, ‘to be free from freedom.’” ~ Eric Hoffer, [The True Believer]
“The freedom the masses crave is not freedom of self-expression and self-realization, but freedom from the intolerable burden of an autonomous existence.” ~ Eric Hoffer, [The True Believer]
"It’s a tragedy how badly some people are brainwashed into believing an institutionalized setting akin to the prison system is the only way a child will grow up to be a “functioning adult.”
“Men are not prisoners of Fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.” ~ Franklin Roosevelt
“The prisoner grows to love his chains.” ~ Plato
“No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free.” ~ Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing
“Like prison, the reward of school, is getting out.” ~ Isaac Asimov
“All restraints upon man’s natural liberty, not necessary for the simple maintenance of justice, are of the nature of slavery, and differ from each other only in degree.” ~ Lysander Spooner
“These walls are funny. First you hate 'em, then you get used to 'em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That’s institutionalized.” ~ Morgan Freeman [The Shawshank Redemption]
“If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking… is freedom.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
“Most people spend less time outside than prisoners.” ~ J.R. Rim
“Most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only in so far as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives.” ~ Ivan Illich
“In a world where everything and everyone is required to be the same, eccentricity and individuality will get you banned from almost everywhere. I have always felt it’s better to wander off in one’s madness than to sit in shackles with the others on the bus.” ~ Unknown
“It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the ring of a bell for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home demanding that you do its “homework”.” ~ John Taylor Gatto [Why Schools Don’t Educate]
“Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that have increasingly come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning. From metal detectors to drug tests, from increased policing to all-seeing electronic surveillance, the public schools of the twenty-first century reflect a society that has become fixated on crime, security and violence.”[1]—Investigative journalist Annette Fuentes. (Story by John W. Whitehead, republished from Rutherford.org.)
“I was undisciplined by birth, never would I bend, even in my tender youth, to a rule. It was at home I learned the little I know. Schools always appeared to me like a prison, and never could I make up my mind to stay there, not even for four hours a day, when the sunshine was inviting, the sea smooth, and when it was joy to run about the cliffs in the free air, or to paddle in the water.” ~ Claude Monet
“Everyone who has ever been to school knows that school is prison, but almost nobody beyond school age says it is. It’s not polite. We all tiptoe around the truth because admitting it would make us seem cruel and would point a finger at well-intentioned people doing what they believe to be essential. . . . A prison, according to the common, general definition, is any place of involuntary confinement and restriction of liberty. In school, as in adult prisons, the inmates are told exactly what they must do and are punished for failure to comply. Actually, students in school must spend more time doing exactly what they are told than is true of adults in penal institutions. Another difference, of course, is that we put adults in prison because they have committed a crime, while we put children in school because of their age.” ~ Peter O. Gray, [Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life]
“Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality… Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, military bases, and hospitals which in turn all resemble prisons? In these spaces, the human being is completely at the mercy of the authority exerted over them” ~ Michel Foucault
“Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.” ~ Michel Foucault
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"A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they PERCEIVE that the command comes from a legitimate AUTHORITY.” ~ Dr. Stanley Milgram
If you haven’t already, we highly recommend that you see the documentary movie, “The Stanford Prison Experiment”, which was a social psychology experiment at Stanford that attempted to investigate the psychological effects of perceived power, focusing on the struggle between prisoners and prison officers.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU PUT GOOD PEOPLE IN AN EVIL PLACE? DOES HUMANITY WIN OVER EVIL, OR DOES EVIL TRIUMPH? THESE ARE SOME OF THE QUESTIONS WE POSED IN THIS DRAMATIC SIMULATION OF PRISON LIFE CONDUCTED IN 1971 AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY.
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