Why has no one mentioned Foucault yet? I don’t really know much about him (and don’t like the post-structuralism and doomerist tendencies) but he did set out to answer the question "Why does everything look like a prison?" In his book “Discipline and Punish”. E.g. Schools, barracks, offices all tend to have long straight, easy to surveil hallways and so on. He said it’s all part of something he calls the “carceral system” dominating society.
Also, there are actually beautiful schools in Germany with nice round hallways, organic design, lots of greenery, open spaces, gardens with flowers and vegetables etc. but they cost lots of money for tuition, and are lead by a weird anti science sect with Nazi tendencies (Waldorf).
it goes even further, ostensibly paris was greatly rebuilt under napoleon III to have those wide straight avenues to make crowd control easier in case paris riots again
I love the old multi-story brick schools with lots of big windows. They’re so beautiful. I think I was lucky enough to not go to any that looked like prisons.
It’s cheap to build and maintain. It just gets called “institutional architecture” sometimes.
Some of the schools I went to were architecturally interesting, but you bet there was still a lot of cinderblock, steel and harsh lighting.
Hospitals in my Canadian province often have the same vibe, although they start getting into that communist architecture feeling a bit, too.
into that communist architecture feeling
I’m guessing you’re talking about the post-WWII low-cost housing Khrushchevka (“commieblocks”), Soviet modernism, or the related Brutalist concrete architecture? (Because in context I assume it’s not constructivist, socialist classicism, or non-Soviet styles from around the world)
“Communist architecture” also known as “building cheap efficient affordable housing in bulk in a destroyed economy instead of a letting everyone be homeless to build a few pretty houses”
South Korean public schools are inviting spaces.
Phillipines too
Ours have a lot of doors for a prison but nowadays they do have them locked from the outside and is kinda creepy relative to when I was a kid. All the students wear their id around their necks.
Is this an American problem most of us are too European to understand
There are some incredibly prison looking schools in Vienna. Most of the prisons just look like random apartment or administrative buildings from the outside.
Imo schools look like prisons in China and Japan too
At least in Japan they have fresh cooked food and teach students how to eat healthy.
Because it’s a building that optimizes people in small rooms in a finite space. Built on a budget that asks for durable plain construction by the lowest bidder. In some cases the same construction firms might very well win contracts to build either.
Why doesn’t most office space look like prisons? Office space is general use and can be leased and it’s intended to be torn up and modernized every few years.
I think its because both need to house a large amount of individuals in as small a space as acceptable to the outside society. But also, both are ultimately mechanisms of authority that shirk their supposed goals of education on the one hand and restitution/rehabilitation on the other.
Related, perhaps unpopular opinion: It’s outright silly how we expect a good learning environment to come out of putting all of our socially unformed minds into one big facility, with little behavioral supervision (10-to-1, 15-to-1, or worse), and compel them to move from location to location by a bell, and to perform rote memorization in order to meet some metric of success. It’s sillier how we expect children to come out of this environment socially well-adjusted, having learned something of value, without psychological trauma, besides the experience of navigating a system of hierarchical authority. You know the wisdom passed down by my liberal (using liberal here in a very strict sense – NOT necessarily left leaning) Catholic father, who ostensibly would defend the value of educating the public (though, perhaps not the value of public education)?
“Find out what the teacher wants and give it to them.”
I think this is quite a pessimistic view of what a school system could/should provide. The learning environment isn’t just what is taught in a classroom (though this should of course be a decent curriculum), but the comprehensive system should ‘force’ socialisation with people whose backgrounds don’t match your own.
The danger — to my mind — of losing a school system, is that you end up with an increasingly stratified society, where there is no reason for mixing between groups, and there is at once no mechanism for social mobility, and no driver for the development of empathy for ‘out’ groups.
I’m talking from a UK perspective and would say our school system is FAR from perfect, but I’m also very wary of home schooling etc., as I’d argue that would drive inequality in education up massively.
I hear you, especially because there is a lot of pressure from the right to destroy public education outright – But I didn’t really say much about what a school system could/should provide? Only what it currently does not provide, at least in the US. It’s a pessimistic take, for sure, but the reality is so bad here that if I had to choose, my (nonexistent) kid would be home schooled. For sure, the current system could be improved a whole lot simply with more teachers (or adults), I’d guess, taking part in the learning experience – but not completely fixed.
I’m focused on the learning environment because in my view, a schools primary purpose is to impart knowledge through learning. I don’t think that purpose can be achieved without an environment conducive to learning. Throwing all the kids in a community into a building with little adult supervision, where they cannot leave for 6 hours, where they must move when the bell tolls, where they have to deal with the myriad social issues of a young person – that is not a physical environment conducive to learning. A compulsory curriculum with graded assignments and examinations does not, IMO, make a kid (me) open to knowledge – it makes him aware of conditional acceptance and a hierarchy of accomplishment. At best, it makes him want to get a good grade, or be in good standing with the teacher. And he will! But all he’ll learn is, as I said, how to find out what the teacher wants and give it to them.
Now that I’m older, I’m finding I missed out on a whole lot of good books, for example, because I was compelled to read them for a class, rather than curious to find out what was inside them. In classic capitalist fashion, I did the most efficient thing when I was in school: I read a summary of the books online and nailed the tests.
Obviously, there are also the secondary purposes of school, like learning acceptable socialization and conflict resolution strategies, but, as I said, dumping 10 kids to 1 teacher (and even this is a relatively low ratio) in a classroom is not going to be conducive to learning these things. They ought to be learned, for sure, but school as it is now fails at this and only outputs trauma and a stratified student body – the exact thing you’re thinking school should prevent! The whole structure of public schools here teaches that there are good students and bad students, that the good students are rewarded and the bad students are punished or, at best, ignored. There are parallels there, in my view, with how we treat the disabled, the sick, the imprisoned, the poor, or anyone whose ability does not fit neatly into the structure we’ve provided (capitalism) that our current school system feeds into.
sorry for the novel lol.
My public schools had teacher/student ratios up to 35-1. Good old Utah.
They don’t everywhere even in the US. Anywhere with a decent public works budget or older building stock won’t have that aesthetic.
In EU prisons look like schools. Seriously most prisons here just look like student dormitories. And nothing like movie (aka american) prisons.
Any building that has to maintain a high degree of physical security and be built at minimum cost can look like a prison.
Today on “things that happen only in the US”…
Today on “read the rest of the comments”…
Can you be more specific on what reminds you of prisons with your schools? I don’t think any of my schools in Germany looked anything like a prison.
Schools look pretty nice in NZ, I think.
