I mean, not really? I think you're projecting the behaviour of the USSR (or whatever) onto the architectural style. From an aesthetic perspective, brutalism can be surprisingly pleasing -- especially if you throw in some trees: https://twitter.com/Karl_poyzer/status/1246511600300896257
For me, the trees are the only things about those examples that I actually like. Absent the trees, they remind me of the Tricorn center in Portsmouth, which local folklore claims won two architectural awards: a professionally awarded one for being good, and an award from locals who had to live with it for being the worst.
The place has long since been demolished; I remember it from personal experience as a shopping centre where all the shops had closed, and as a car park where nobody parked.
It's the distinctness and uniqueness of those examples, as well as that they're surrounded by trees/nature, that make them so beautiful. Brutalism as intentional art, not as an unintended byproduct of cost-saving or simply not caring.
The depressing nature of a lot of brutalist architecture (especially that created by governments) is the uniformity, homogeneity and the mass-produced faux-utilitarian feeling it evokes, as if the inhabitants are all interchangeable peons with no individual spirit. It's a reminder of the depressing local conditions that lead to that architecture coming into being in the first place.
Brutalism is simply an architectural style characterized by the use of raw concrete. It can be done well in various ways and badly in various ways, like virtually any style.
It's worth noting that Phil is not just wrong about brutalism but also wrong about these examples being (primarily) brutalist. Not generally using raw concrete, they would not be considered brutalist. The modern "box" has been largely discarded by contemporary institutional architects in favor of rough, pseudo-gabbled, uh, crap, as shown in the majority of these examples.
I'd say a bad brutalist building is like a rough bureaucratic dictate whereas present bad institutional architecture is like a bureaucratic dictate but rewritten with contemporary niceness guides - "this is a notice concerning your rights under the involuntary amputation act"
To my aesthetic sense, virtually every “brutalist” structure feels authoritarian and dystopian to me. It is not only a good architectural style for prisons, but for any other building that is built with the intention of resembling a prison, which is what makes it so useful for government offices and the like.
Have you ever set up a high-occupancy building in a structure that isn’t rectilinear? It’s a space efficiency nightmare to fit naturally rectangular fixtures and appliances to rounded walls. I worked in a beautiful post-modernist building with a terrible architectural oversight: the aesthetically charming glass panels acted as a lens that focused light in a way that heated the whole office up. The AC had to be cranked up high just to survive in there. I would take a well-lit, well-ventilated box over a more architecturally creative space that causes its occupants problems.
Although your classification of the images presented above is incorrect, brutalism can actually be quite a beautiful architectural style. Except perhaps when attempted by American educational institutions.
A lot of these images only show a very narrow look at what looks to be the entrance to some front desk style room. I'd be more interested in what the insides look like.
I would guess that the intention is for the readers to think about other similarities between schools and prisons, and the the outsides of the buildings are just a convenient way to inspire more comparisons.
Going to be honest though. School (at least mine) functioned very similarly to a prison, in fact, most prisons had better conditions than my secondary school.
There is a simple fact that schools can be glorified daycare so that workers can offload the burden of childcare. For this purpose, a prison makes sense. Despite not being the most humane considering the kids didn’t do any crime worthy of rehabilitation.
I can't even look at school as not being a prison. It's one of the only places I've had the displeasure to be denied basic rights such as going to use a toilet.
Also one of the only places with a nontrivial amount of people who would lie about needing to go to the bathroom, many times per day, just to be disruptive and/or to get out of class.
aka "this is why we can't have nice things", juvenile edition :)
I think you need to ask why a non trivial amount of people would lie about needing to go to the bathroom. This is not a common behavior of teenagers at home, in a museum, at camp, on a canoe trip, or just about anywhere else I can think of...
Kids lie to avoid eating vegetables... because humans are evolutionary adapted to really like sugar, and they know that higher sugar foods exist.
Sugar = good is no longer an appropriate heuristic given the change in nutritional availability - in fact it is now harmful - so we force kids to behave differently.
It's not clear that school is similar. Is it not the case that people learn better when they are adequately stimulated and engaged? Even if not, how far should we go in making kids miserable to force them to learn more? Do we need to make them miserable or is there an alternative? This is what I mean by asking why, and it's not clear to me what all the answers are (it's a very complex question).
Teachers can deal with it. It's worth it to have to deal with the second order effects of folks lying to be disruptive or getting out of class so that we don't deny basic bathroom rights to those who need it most.
I have literally ZERO sympathy for any teacher who has shitty (haha) bathroom policies.
> just to be disruptive and/or to get out of class
Stopping making a big deal out of it will remove the disruption factor. If you can just get up and leave and nobody pays attention the act will quickly lose its effect.
> to get out of class
This suggests there's a bigger problem there if people are so desperate to get out as to fake a bathroom break, but anyway, why not let them? What's the harm? If these people are bored/disgruntled/etc then you already lost the game and no amount of force or coercion will change their mind.
I remember hearing that my school was actually modelled after a prison. Don't know if it was actually true, but it sure looked like it, since it had this large, multi-storey hall with classrooms all around it.
My kid's suburban high school sits amidst a large grouping of light industrial warehouses. We joke that the district built it's own warehouse...for kids.
As referenced in the comment with the Foucault quote, the modern school and prison are both structures designed in a way that makes it easier for their authorities (wardens, guards, principals and teachers) to contain and control their captive populations (prisoners and students).
In his book "Discipline and Punish", Foucault argues that in the establishment of the modern prison, the mission of imprisonment shifted from punishing those who were imprisoned to reforming and disciplining them to become better citizens. The same organizing principles of command and control developed for "modern" prisons were applied to the "modern" school as well. I thought the game eerily demonstrated how similar prisons and schools look to one another. Both kinds of buildings are designed to limit access to the building and also egress.
I doubt that is how schools functions and that they were trying to make obedient citizens that follows regular hours or whatever nonsense people conjure up.
The reason schools operate that way is simple: sheer inertia combined with just being impervious to reform.
What makes the the nonsense you're conjuring up, with no argument or research, more valid than that of the renowned philosophers you are trivially dismissing? Doubt is good, but strong, unjustified claims are not.
Interesting link, thanks for sharing. I read it and I think there's some miscommunication going on. The author is criticizing Sal Khan and like for suggesting that there was a deliberate, cohesive factory model (designed in order to..) whereas the commenter recounting Foucault here talks about the effects of the model, not its intention (designed in a way that...)
Indeed there is no mention of Foucault in that article. I read through her blog more and this is the first one I found that mentions the book in question http://hackeducation.com/2020/07/20/surveillance (also an interesting read)
Renowned philosophers tend to be good in philosophy. They are not necessary great in history, sociology or how various organizations work. They have own biases and it is also pretty easy to take their claims out of context to sound like something much stronger.
Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, 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?
this is because tall, rectangular buildings maximize volume to surface area, whether a hospital school or prison. It is not a form of social control or domination. it is more efficient this way. A one-story hospital would be prohibitively expensive to build in an urban area, and it is not like healthcare is not already too expensive.
> tall, rectangular buildings maximize volume to surface area,
I imagine that you mean that tall buildings maximize ground area, and that most property is rectangular.
The way to maximize volume to surface area is to build spheres, or cubes if you're forced to remain rectilinear, but tall buildings optimize for ground area.
Surface area in this case refers to surface area of the earth, while volume refers to volume of the structures placed on the earth.
OP is entirely correct, and no one misunderstood the point OP was making. You are simultaneously being needlessly pedantic, and less than charitable by needlessly interpreting inconsequential ambiguities in OPs sentence in a way that would have made them incorrect.
Someone else commented on the downvotes on your post being wrong, the above is why I downvoted you.
I misunderstood the point OP was making. But even interpreting "surface area" to mean "ground area", it's only right in dense areas without open land. The reason schools are built the way they are is to optimize for cost.
Some of that's land, but some is also the design and construction. You're probably hiring a design firm that specializes in building efficient brick box schools and similar institutional projects, maybe with a big glass atrium to have one showcase area, and they've got that design patten pretty well nailed down.
When you have space, you get sprawling flat schools. Still probably a brick box, but not a tall one. My school had large portions that were only one floor tall, and one area that stacked two floors. They've since knocked it down and replaced it with a 3-story building, because now they need more capacity and no longer had space to keep tacking additions on.
Would it have used a smaller footprint to stack it taller to begin with? Sure, but the building lot wasn't the liming factor, budget was.
> You are simultaneously being needlessly pedantic, and less than charitable by needlessly interpreting inconsequential ambiguities in OPs sentence in a way that would have made them incorrect.
Dial it back.
When I hear "most volume per surface area" I think of dome architecture, and anyone with even a slight interest in geometry or architecture would probably think similarly.
I wasn't being rude, I was helping explain their point because the words they used didn't match the ideas they meant to convey.
Also interesting to talk about, are the ways that the people influenced by Foucault talk about space, area, and architectural design. Deleuze and Guattari had a whole lot to say about all of those topics, and they are one of the principle reasons for Foucaults fame...
Where is the forced labor in schools, barracks, hospitals and factories? I understand there are some instances where this might be the case, but generally people go to those places because they want to, or because it offers them a favorable outcome that they're willing to temporarily trade some autonomy for.
You can deconstruct the whole of society and make an argument that all labor exchanged for capital is oppression, that all regular chronologies favored by the dominant culture is oppression, that all authority figures are oppressive etc... But it's difficult to imagine a thriving, post-industrial society not featuring some of those things.
Even looking back in history, people have self-organized into hierarchical, regimented systems. I think a lot of this is just a natural reaction to our environment, which is also dictated by regular chronologies (days, lunar cycle, seasons), necessary labor (biological need for food and shelter) and implicit authority figures (parents).
Sure, there's no inevitability, but there can also be ways that make sense.
It might be possible to make a space launch vehicle that's short and squat, or operate a factory without any regular worker hours, but it's going to have some costs compared to our current equilibrium
when i am sick at work, then i can take a few days off. (with or without pay). whatever work needs to get done, will be done by someone else, and i join back in without penalty when i am ready
when my kids miss school, they have to catch up the work they missed. if they already struggle then they can't afford to get sick because they will fall to far behind and may not be able to catch up.
Ex-primary teacher here. At any one time a certain percentage of kids in the class would be off sick, it was a given. So the curriculum doesn't proceed linearly but more like a helix: it circles around and around the same topics year by year with each child being supported to learn at the level they are - always a broad range in any one class.
So it's in my experience totally untrue to suggest that any child would have to "catch up" any learning missed due to sickness (and also reveals that schools are talking bollocks when they suggest that taking a few days off to go on holiday during termtime will have any noticeable adverse effect, but shhhh)
Yah, catch-up work often feels punitive but it appears to be universally expected by instructors. I'm a MS teacher, and I don't really care (though it does complicate my assessments), but my kids' teachers do really care about every piece of work being turned in.
Sometimes it's ridiculous-- my then-4th grader was taking Algebra I on the side, and had shown mastery on the 4th grade fraction curriculum on a test, but getting the large packet of fraction work that he missed during an absence was considered critically important. :P
> reveals that schools are talking bollocks when they suggest that taking a few days off to go on holiday during termtime
I do think that the kind of attitude that lets you ignore a bit of schooling here and there for a convenient vacation schedule does affect outcomes, though. I teach at a private school, but I think we're both aware of incentives for attendance, the reasons for them, and the areas in which they cause perverse outcomes.
> So it's in my experience totally untrue to suggest that any child would have to "catch up" any learning missed due to sickness (and also reveals that schools are talking bollocks when they suggest that taking a few days off to go on holiday during termtime will have any noticeable adverse effect, but shhhh)
But it does seem true, from the point of view of parents and children. It doesn't matter that the curriculum is helical and revisits the same topics multiple times. It doesn't revisit the same topics multiple time in a single semester, which means the kid doesn't get a second chance to learn a topic within the grading scope, which means they have to catch up or risk a lower grade. As much as we say that it's the education that matters, as much as it should matter - it doesn't. What matters are the grades. At the very least, in my experience, most parents have grade expectations, and the kid will suffer negative consequences this semester if they fall back, even though they may recover by the end of the education level (where again, the final grades are all that matters).
(Even though the immediate pressure may come from the parents, it's in a control loop with the grades, so the school can't pretend this is not happening.)
Of course grades are fairly meaningless in elementary school, unless they are so bad you're needing to repeat a year. Being sick for a few days won't cause that. At that level grades are mostly just feedback to the parents.
As a parent, if my 4th or 6th grader got a lower grade due to missing homework as a result of being sick, it wouldn't concern me.
In high school it starts to matter more due to grades being a component of college admissions, but unless you're targeting really elite schools a couple of days of missed work isn't going to move the needle much. And if you are targeting elite schools, you're already working very hard and including a lot of AP courses and extracuricular activities and you will just buckle down and make up the work.
Kids can actually take free days off. They don't actually have to do everything that was done while they have been away, usually we have done just small portion of it. Kids that struggle just continues struggling and kids that perceive school easy just continue lazying around.
That doesn't make it a prison: neither another student nor the teacher can step in and learn the material for your child. I don't know what you think would be an appropriate option there.
Also, you may have a job where none of your responsibilities are unique to you, but that's not often the case outside of some types of shift work. If I take a vacation or sick days, I have catching up to do. No one is going to step in for a couple of days and pickup where I left off on a project I've been working on for 3 months.
As for missing school, my kids go to typical mediocre public schools. When a student is struggling, they're given a little extra help. When they miss because they're sick, they're given plenty of time to makeup the work. And if a student is struggling so much that they can't reasonably move on to the next year's more complex material, the school literally devotes and extra year if resources to
That doesn't mean a student doesn't miss something when they're away from school. Self-paced just changes the timing. The dynamic is not comparable to a work environment where someone else might be able to do the work for you. No one can learn for your child when they are away, and that fact doesn't change with less rigidly structured Montessori schools.
They still need to actually learn the stuff. That's my point based on your original comment: You're comment was comparing work to school, and that normal schools were bad in some way because at work you could miss time and someone else would step in. I said, repeated, and will say again: learning does not work that way. No one can step in for you. Montessori doesn't change that. It changes the timing and, sure, the direct pressure from the teacher. That doesn't mean there isn't some type of pressure: from the parent, from the other students that are obliged to help in their co-operative learning structure, etc.
I'm not debating the merits of Montessori schools. I'm saying the "missing time" aspect of your comment does not have a good analog from work to learning. That's all.
i am not concerned about who is doing the work, but when it needs to be done.
missing time means, that you need to work overtime to make up for it.
at work this is not normally the case. if the work can't be done by someone else, then it will simply be delayed. the timing changes. same with montessori learning. you will simply delay all your learning by a few days. which is not a problem at all because everyone is learning at their own pace anyways.
contrast that with traditional schooling where overtime is the only way to catch up with your classmates
>but generally people go to those places because they want to, or because it offers them a favorable outcome that they're willing to temporarily trade some autonomy for.
I don't think this is why kids go to school. You go to school because you have to. There is no realistic option not to go. If you don't go, then you'll be forcefully put into a school for troubled kids. Even if you don't consider the above, there is still an enormous social pressure to go to school too.
I hate the current system but I also want my kids to be socialised and have friends.
I'd definitely pay a private company providing "home schooling" and using a different model of education where kids are learning by doing instead of memorising crap and at the same time can share a location with other kids of the same age (+ a few tutor available to unblock kids when needed but not delivering frontal lessons).
"The Montessori method of education is an educational method developed by Italian physician Maria Montessori. Emphasizing independence, it views children as naturally eager for knowledge and capable of initiating learning in a sufficiently supportive and well-prepared learning environment. It discourages some conventional measures of achievement, such as grades and tests."
I don't have any first-hand knowledge of how such initiatives work in practice; but at a high level, it's like home-schooling with more community involvement and socialization, as well as off-site learning experiences. I've also heard of some families who do half-and-half between a formal school environment, and unschooling/homeschooling.
Outside of "forced labor", just about any large building is going to have people & operations that occur on fixed schedules and have some degree of security.
Maybe not: If he considered those sorts of structures (absent the forced labor) to be inherently bad in some way then I do not understand that point of view.
This is certainly a sound explanation – but is it a good one? If we optimize school buildings and prison buildings in a way that they end up being indistinguishable from one another, maybe we should reconsider the metrics we are optimizing for.
I'm not sure I get what's the problem with schools and prisons looking the same. Prisons should look like the rest of the world after all, they're supposed to be places where you learn to function in society.
Prisons have to be resistant to the attempts of their occupants to escape, or to cause damage or destruction. This doesn't really seem compatible with warm and inviting.
Most prisoners don't want to escape, or cause harm, they just want to finish the term and go home and move on. I'd say you could have the honor system (unlocked doors) for 95 percent of prisoners, by letting them know if they escape they'll go to a more secure and less free prison. Then you make prison a place to learn new skills and get treatment for addictions and therapy, and you'll actually see some improvement in society. Also, send less people to prison.
We already have prisons like that for low-risk, nonviolent offenders. They are called minimum security or "country club" prisons. We also have home detention.
In America that's so rare it's nonexistent. A few rich white collar criminals might get home detention, but for most people who have the option, it's too expensive, with fees of hundreds of dollars a month or more. Country club prisons aren't a real thing, that's just talking points for the "tough on crime" politicians who want to make prison sound fun.
They can be. If you're curious, check out "worlds toughest prisons" on Netflix, an episode that shows a Norwegian rehabilitation-focused prison. You can see how the place is both secure and warm.
I've seen pictures of Norwegian prisons. They certainly look comfortable, but I wouldn't describe them as "open, warm, and inviting". They look halfway between a no-frills dorm and the psychiatric ward I stayed in for a while as a teenager. Certainly far more humane than American prisons, but still clearly _institutional_.
To me, they looked like buildings. Neither looked horrifying, they were just normal buildings. You would have to make prison intentionally bad looking from outside to make some effect. And i wild still strongly preferred to go to school rather then prison.
You are completely missing the point. Try https://www.schoolprison.com/ and you'll see how the esthetic of building can change dramatically while keeping the same requirements of efficiency, cost and safety.
> It is not a form of social control or domination. it is more efficient this way.
efficiency doesn't stop with a building's dimensions. efficiency demands social control. it doesn't care whether that happens through self-control and self-discipline or through domination.
High-end office builds are also efficient rectangular prisms far more often than not, yet they don't feel like hospitals, schools or prisons.
I've spent extensive time in all of these except prisons, and I can tell you the difference is stark. What explains that? Is it all just down to expensive trim and interior decor? I'm sure that plays a part, but that was never my main impression. Instead, it comes down to the layout and light and feel: it's clear when a building, however regular and rectangular, is designed to support and empower the occupants and when it's designed to control and direct.
High-end office buildings cost massively more to build. Also plenty of them put employees in a very aesthetically pleasing well-lit panopticon with open-plan seating. I much prefer my dingy fluorescent-lit office that has a door that closes. (And I turn of the fluorescent lights in favor of my own small lamp.)
Floor fitout is typically left to the tenant, not the landlord. Building skyscrapers with empty floors gives flexibility to future tenants, increasing the rental/purchase value.
Tall office buildings may often have open plan, but this should be attributed to the fitout builder’s client (e.g. SomeCrazySoftwateCompany as the incoming tenant), not the building builder’s client (e.g. SomeGroupInvestmentCompany the owner of the building)
If you takeout the actual tenant configurations of offices, the idea of "High-End office buildings" becomes pretty irrelevant in this conversation & context of the comment I replied to. Because at that point you're basically just talking about the lobby & the elevators, and the view out the windows.
I've noticed authoritarians tend to care about maximizing volume to surface area over aesthetics, so I don't think those things are entirely unrelated.
This is one of the most delightfully overblown quotes of all time. But Herbert Marcuse went one better: he compared amusement parks to concentration camps.
I still have actual regular nightmares from my school-years, even though I've just reached 40 years of age. They started when I was 20-something, and they will probably never go away. What is more interesting is that during my school years I never looked at school as an institution as being repressive or "prison-like", looks like my unconscious/subconscious/whatever there is there inside was very good at repressing that obvious fact.
I hated school too. But what caused your nightmares? For me, it was my peers, not oppressive teachers. Most modern high school movies seem to suggest the same thing. So perhaps we should fix the quote. Schools are like prisons - where the prisoners have taken over the institution.
I don't think Marcuse should be taken lightly on this point. As a Jew during the second world war and an immigrant to the US, he worked with Adorno and others who regularly (and correctly, in my opinion) viewed the Holocaust as humanity's greatest horror and a turning point of modernity.
Marcuse wasn't a Jew, actually. But yeah, I don't really find the analysis convincing. I mean... amusement parks have towers, and queues, and walls round the outside, like concentration camps? And they're... organized and administered? Somehow this isn't quite getting past the laugh test. (Isaiah Berlin was absolutely outraged by the Marcuse quote, incidentally.)
Update: Marcuse was a Jew, actually. My bad. I'd misremembered this from Martin Jay's book.
For the world to be organized any other way you'd need to essentially revise the entire economic system and social contract. If there are billions of people and very unequal resource partitions this will be the inevitable result
skepticism about age of consent laws is a time-honored libertarian tradition. it's not even strictly foucauldian. and as a nietzschean, foucault didn't believe in moral authority.
More or less the entire French Intellectual establishment argued at that time for "the decriminalization of all consensual relations between adults and minors below the age of fifteen".
While I agree that seems extremely stupid, it is based on a morally tenable argument that people under that age could give consent. That may be incorrect but if accepted as a premise would justify their position.
So if Foucault believed this and his moral arguments derived from that, it would seem unwise to dismiss all his moral authority just because you believe he was wrong on this point.
I personally think he is totally wrong and that even people at the age of eighteen struggle to know their own minds clearly with regard to consent. However I do not as a result think Foucault is impossible to take a moral lead from.
> More or less the entire French Intellectual establishment argued at that time
Then the question is, how does one become intellectual establishement. Sounds like dissenters were somehow excluded from that nebulous subjective category.
Well I just meant that the roll call of names that signed the petition is fairly extraordinary:
Louis Aragon, Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Leiris, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Philippe Sollers, Jacques Rancière, Jean-François Lyotard, Francis Ponge, Bernard Besret
That was indeed what I was referring to. Rather than interpreting your first paragraph as a pardon of Foucault, I consider it a condemnation of the group entire.
If your (or their, the french intellectual elite's/literati's) philosophy is so morally vacuous that it fails to recognize the sexual exploitation of children and young teenagers as reprehensible, then it is worth less than nothing. It is an evil.
Consent is not enough, is the common modern view. Power structures and actual power matters too.
In some sense, surely advocating (almost successfully, if I recall correctly) for a repeal of age of consent laws must be worse than the crime itself. That is, if we are of the opinion that pedophilia is wrong. Consider the difference between orchestrating many murders and a single murder as an analogy.
No, Foucault (and the others on that list) have been let off the hook for too long. The aesthetician in me is horrified, youth is beauty and they want it defiled?
And a disclaimer; I am of course a conservative in every sense of the word, and this is my perspective.
1960's-1970s celebrity culture was full of young groupies sleeping with older men. Bowie, Jagger, Ozzy, etc were all doing it, and often brazen about it, so its not overly surprising that European intellectuals just wanted it formalized as they were doing it too. They felt it harmless enough for their own selfish reasons and wrapped it up into a 'autonomy of self' argument that, of course, was very self-serving. I think this is good evidence that when you stray outside of your specialty (adult ethics) then you can make some obvious mistakes in other specialized fields (children's sexuality). It probably doesn't help that you have both a strong anti-authoritarian movement and sexual revolution movement happening at the same time, which only added fuel to this fire.
Its still wrong, but anachronistically wrong a bit like how many elements the founding fathers put in which are good government but did so under the unforgivable sin of slavery. If that's too 'ancient history' for you, let's consider Brendan Eich's contribution to Firefox but also understand he is a homophobe. We can still use and appreciate Firefox's technical advancements without worrying about Eich's homophobia.
Age of consent skeptics are as old as time anyway. It rages on today in the modern libertarian party and incel culture. Anti-authoritarian and reactionary movements often become victimizers of children and women and racial/religious minorities because these groups are often protected by authority. When you remove authority, suddenly they are powerless and easy prey to whatever replaces that authority. The most obvious example are soldiers raping women in towns they take over.
seeing how the sex offender registry in the us has created a legal sub-caste with no functional distinction between violent rapists and a 19 year old who sexted their 17 year old gf, while doing seemingly nothing to curb the actual abuse and trafficking of minors, it is hard to say the carceral approach has really been more effective or beneficial than what foucault advocated.
I suggest you read the interview he gave on the topic. Besides that, I'm not sure what makes you think Foucault is trying to be a moral authority in the first place. He was demeaned for most of his life on the basis of the moral prohibition on homosexuality. Why would he be sympathetic to moral systems?
Well, certainly this case in particular is one of morals in so far as I understand the concept of morality. To me, sexual relations with children is immoral, it is not proper behaviour in which an adult should partake.
Foucault seemed to think it was, if not proper behaviour, then at least not-unproper. That is a moral judgement.
To suggest that Foucault was above the entire concept of morals as I understand you to do, well I can't agree on that and I don't think he would either. Of course he was trying to be a moral authority, remember that this whole thing was about him (and others) attempting to legalize sexual relations with children. If he did not think himself an authority, on what merit would he petition? And barring that, it is clear that he was and maybe is an authority, because here we are half a century later or so still discussing his position.
His experiences does not excuse him in my eyes. Neither does it impact to the slightest degree the truth-value of his position on this issue, nor of his philosophy overall.
>To me, sexual relations with children is immoral, it is not proper behaviour in which an adult should partake.
It may be a moral issue, but there are pragmatic or non-moral reasons one may argue as Foucault did. You may find those reasons detestable and disgusting. That doesn't mean he was making any appeal to moral sentiment - he was just acting on what he finds beneficial or detrimental. Whether on behalf of sympathy for prisoners against the carceral state, or another reason.
>If he did not think himself an authority, on what merit would he petition?
He can do so not speaking on moral authority, but on a variety of authorities - the authority of a public intellectual, for instance. I don't think he was being a moral leader, or attempting to be. The people who would listen to him, the public at large, would not do so because of his moral position in their eyes. An authority as an enduring public intellectual with a strong grasp on philosophy and sociology within his tradition, for sure. A moral authority? Nobody has ever quoted Foucault in such a way.
His experiences would not excuse him (in your view; in mine, there is little to need an excuse if you examine his intentions), but they would provide a rational explanation for why he would forgo morality to expound his own opinions in pragmatic or non-moral reasons. He may have just not cared about morality (the same system that troubled him, I don't know) and reasoned on his feelings and pragmatism alone. I'm not trying to excuse him, I'm trying to explain him, though I'm really just speculating.
It's funny how people complain about "motivated reasoning" and demand an immense amount of rigour when someone says something they disagree with (say, whichever side people take on the "Google's ideological echo chamber" argument); but are very willing to buy very reductionist and broad statements when their gut tells them it's just right.
I suppose maybe there is some truth to it. But he's highly disingenuous with his implications. It's like a Twitter hot-take that's expanded into a book. Hard libertarians might argue that taxation is in some way equivalent to slavery, which is also technically true but a very biased presentation of the facts. Schools and hospitals are similar to prisons in the same way taxation is similar to slavery (you can find similarities, but ignoring the differences is just asinine).
Every right requires responsibilities. If students have a right to learn, then schools have a responsibility to teach them. If young adults have a right to be educated in a broad range of topics (many of which did not interest them as children) then children have a responsibility to learn. Control is all about forcing people to take responsibility, because otherwise rights will be unfulfilled.
The question isn't whether control exists (it can and should) but whether the intent and implementation is just and efficient. A communist dictator can claim the right to a huge portion of the country's wealth while its population starves, this would be unjust.
There are valid questions to ask about control. Is it better to control inputs or outputs? Is it better to have a rule of laws and systems, or a rule of individuals with authority - discretion means giving more power to individuals. Are the trade-offs our society makes currently fair and worthwhile? If a punishment keeps the majority of the population responsible (thus giving creating rights) but hurts the occasional person who is somehow resistant to control is it a bad thing? But simply assuming that control is bad is silly.
1984's From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe is a great dive into the 'modern' look. It's not a deep look, but a fun one all the same (it is Tom Wolfe after all).
He traces the design we all see in the downtowns to the works of early german communists and their desire for good looking spaces and architecture that could cheaply be made for the masses in the coming revolution of the working classes. When capitalists heard about it they stopped listening after 'cheap' was uttered. "Oh, this is the 'modern' look and it's the new thing and it's cheap? Do 'em all like that then."
My recollection of Wolfe's short piece is a bit dated, but that's the theme as I remember. It's a short and fun little satirical look at how the 80's downtowns got to be looking as such.
As an aside, I wonder how Minecraft is going to change the look of architects and cities in the future. I'm dead certain that the architects of the 2070s will have gotten their love of design in Minecraft.
A lot of palaces, museums, galleries, opera houses, universities and houses of government share the same basic layout. You’d be hard pressed to say what the function of the Palace of Westminster was if you didn’t know. It certainly looks a lot like some schools and universities.
See also "Is the front door designed to let one person through at a time, or many".
School buildings move their entire populations through the entrance in the space of 10 minutes. Prisons are more-or-less entirely designed to prevent exactly that from happening.
A fun anecdote from my youth near a US seaboard was that our elementary and middle school buildings were designed by the same person who designed a few prisons around the area.
When I bounced around cities later in life, I was surprised at how many of my peers said the same thing as a conversation piece.
Maybe they used the same governmental bidding process. "Needed: a building. One food preparation and eating area. Hallways suitable for lining up and proceeding in rows with many small rooms. One yard with sporting facilities."
Both are often government contracts so they are often going to attract the same firms and contractors. They share a lot of the same requirements; large and cheap. The exterior facade needs to be easy to construct and unremarkable in that government building kind of way.
This is fantastic. I love how if you do it long enough, the results go way down, and after a while you can no longer tell, or be certain one way or another.
My philosophy teacher said that both prisons and schools end up being a panopticon because you want the same in both places: maximize the feel of power of the authority, don't leave any place without surveillance,...
I have never seen a school with a literal panopticon (a tower from which everything can be seen, and which can not be seen into). So then if not a literal panopticon, a metaphorical panopticon? Doesn't mirror my school experience either. Feeling was that the teachers had no idea what was going on most of the time. But I didn't go to school in the US, maybe that's why?
Technological panopiticons now, most doors are locked or alarmed and the remaining entrances have video surveillance. Windows even on the first floor are often limited from opening very wide. Many American schools also have a police officer on site and it’s not unusual for police to stop children outside of school grounds for truancy.
High schools in the US can sometimes get very close. There are often large schools of two to three thousand students and in a country with ample access to weapons, security becomes an issue very quickly.
Both university level and lower education levels in the US will probably have large security camera systems. I know some smaller schools can't quite afford it but the medium and large state schools can.
I was surprised that this was relatively so easy: you don't have to understand very much about the two types of buildings to spot important functional differences.
As other people have commented, space for windows is crucial. (And, at least 2 of the pictures had identifying words in different languages) I scored 10 out of 10 and the game bounced me out.
By comparison, in the army during initial training I had flashbacks of kindergarten. We weren't herded that much at school. Also the food was for some reason very similar.
In the UK our prisons often look nicer than our (state) schools. Many of our prisons are quite ancient, whereas many of our state schools are 1960s monstrosities.
It’s unfair to compare CLASP [1] buildings with centuries old stone buildings... The CLASP system was a stopgap measure for cost-effectively building schools for the baby boomer generation given the economic constraints of post-WW2 Britain.
And given the purpose of a school, building it cheaply is very utilitarian as it allows you to build schools faster. I would rather have the institution be more effective than more pleasing to look at.
inhuman is a strong word just to talk about schools that were built on the cheap, especially schools that, at the time of constructions, were required because there wasn't enough schools building available.
There's nothing inhuman about any of the three school pictures here. They're built to a human scale (not too tall, decent amounts of internal room), have generous numbers of windows, and are set in outdoor space with grass and trees.
There are, on the other hand, lots of practical problems with this kind of building. The flat roofs have a tendency to leak, they're decades past their design life, thermal control is poor, they're riddled with asbestos, and a number of other issues. And lots of people think they're ugly. But this doesn't make them inhuman, just a flawed solution to a real-world problem.
I think it's easy to forget just what difficulties the UK was in for building in the 1950s and 1960s. There was a spectacular shortage of housing (a baby boom and the effects of WW2 bombing didn't help) and a chronic shortage of both money and skilled labour for building. There is, bluntly, no way that enough traditional brick and stone buildings could have been put up for there to be enough schools. So you can certainly argue that better cheap and/or mass produced buildings should have been made, or that the aesthetics were bad, but writing off all the architecture without understanding its context is unhelpful.
[Edit: in my view, the most inhuman feature of the images is the fencing, but that is almost certainly not original - security in schools was really stepped up from the 1990s onwards]
Aww, I had grown to like that style of architecture while I was living abroad (in Holland, not England, but there was a lot of similarly built structures out in the suburbs where I lived)
monstrosties is a strong word, they're cheap and functional (and anything but pretty, everybody agrees). I grew up in these (both kind, classical and industrial actually) and nobody really cared.
The outside of prisons look nicer. Visitors entrances often look pretty so non-incarcerated people and local officials are presented with an inoffensive facade that's not dissimilar to a modern business or institutional reception area. Conditions in the rest of the building may be appalling, but generally nobody is allowed to take pictures of that.
I find most building in the UK to be either extremely futuristic (think London modern skyscrapers) and out of space, concrete blobs or houses with brick facades.
That's subjective, but I can't say I like any of them
I concede that modernist architecture hasn't aged particularly well, but I grew up in a fairly deprived area of the UK (Torbay) and all the schools are in fairly good condition. The worst one I visited was a private one, even.
Each ground-level classroom could have doors which open onto the surrounding garden. Upper floors can have external stairs, like personal residence buildings.
A school building could provide maximum natural light to the occupants. For example, it could have shape and orientation so most of its windows get sunlight throughout the year. Interior spaces can have skylights and be used for short-duration activities like restrooms, locker rooms, and equipment storage.
Public school is a prison where both parents can abandon their children to be raised by strangers while the parents chase what they really love: money. We make ourselves feel better by teaching them a few worthwhile things during their minimum 13 years in lockdown, coupled with a massive public jobs program, but most of it is a waste of precious family time where parents should be teaching and loving their own children.
UBI and competition between schools can fix all that.
But naked capitalism tells women to "lean in and earn $1 for every 70 cents" instead of telling men to "lean out and earn 70c for every $1" ...and spend more time with your children, family, contributing to open source software, learning science, an instrument, hobbies, sports and exercise and doing other things not valued by the market.
UBI is far superior to both a jobs guarantee, minimum wage laws and unions in rebalancing the power dynamic between the employees and employers.
Instead, today, we are brainwashed that your worth as an individual comes from working for a corporation, and the schools train the kids to sit down and shut up for 10 hours day to do just that. Look at Finland. Or http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158
I'd argue that's a pretty essential skill in the modern world. Reading and writing are arguably the two of the most important skills we can learn since from them you can eventually do anything else.
Paperwork specifically is also pretty important. Sure you could argue that they could postpone teaching that until later but teaching how to fill out paperwork is basically just teaching how to do homework which will be essential for teaching mathematics at any reasonable scale.
Of course now things are digital but it's still the same skills but in a different shade.
I wish I had been taught paperwork or actual practical life skills (filing taxes for example) as opposed to some complex mathematical operations that I don't even remember anymore.
Agree that applies for the majority of people, but for others it's purely a status competition beyond what they currently have which they've decided to engage in.
Money is just a currency. What they really love (and need), is all the goods and services that can be purchased by money, which include the things that keep their children and themselves alive.
This is a good example of a phenomenon I see where this site in particular often seems to have an antipathy towards “public school” that’s wildly foreign to me, as someone who had a pretty bog-standard, middle-of-the-road public education in Scotland.
I sometimes wonder if it’s down to a fundamentally different experience at schools in the US that I’m not aware of?
I feel like I went in one end of the school system, and then came out twelve years later able to read, write, play musical instruments, understand the natural world, think critically, use a computer, and generally having a wide variety of other skills. Teaching quality was mostly fine, with staff who seemed to be pretty engaged. I spent plenty of time outside school with both parents, and I came out with a bunch of skills and knowledge that neither of them would have been able to teach me. My experience was far from perfect, but it was a million miles away from being “a prison”.
The “school is a waste of time” argument seems to be popular in these circles. Is it down to cultural differences? Or maybe it’s just the iceberg tip of a deeper and more earnestly held view about a fundamental restructuring of society and childhood?
Autodidacts who thought school got in the way of their learning and never really got on with most of the other kids their age are overrepresented on HN, and a lot of people not in that category don't have particularly strong opinions about schools...
I think that some of it is due to distaste towards women who are not start at home. There is extraordinary guilting going on here, I mean moms when they argue this particular point are guilting less.
For what it is worth, pandemic made me appreciate teachers more. Pandemic made my kids appreciate school more (and they explicitly stated multiple points where school is better then what went on at home).
my biggest complaint about schools at least in the US is they all are specially designed. they usually have an architect involved. it’s style is specific to the land it’s on. and each one is so expensive to build. then the community can show off its fancy school, great, it’s a snowflake
i would rather the state appoint an architect group to design like 5 model schools that are modular. and then any time a city needs to build one you just get to play some lego on the modular design. this would make school construction faster and cheaper and maintenance easier
Schools are one of the most universal community hubs that the largest majority of a community will interact with regularly. No one wants a cookie cutter community center.
The specific point of the parent comment is that they do want a cookie cutter school. Saying "no one wants that" isn't really a substantial counter argument.
I suppose the problem with them all being so similar would be if you spent every day visiting a different one, you would tire of them all being them same. But no one does that - you spend many years in a single one, without much awareness of others. In the end it's important that it's effective to spend long periods in, and its uniqueness is basically irrelevant to the people that actually use it.
The problem with them all being similar is that would mean they don't reflect their inhabitants. The same as no two rivers flow the same, no two schools work the same. They nominally accomplish the same task in similar ways but will have a fingerprint in how its done. There's a degree of practicality that comes with a school that can be met with common resources, but it's still apparent communities don't want modular schools (regardless of individual opinions).
There's a long list of reasons schools aren't just a cleared field with a bunch of mobile-unit classrooms thrown out there despite that being the most cost-effective way to house classes.
A modular design might work if you're starting from a blank slate, and had relatively few variables to account for. But this is rarely the case, even in new construction on a vacant lot.
Land isn't uniform, lots have shapes, roads already exist, utilities have to be connected, local construction requirements vary, existing structures have to be accounted for. You're likely not going to save money by forcing everyone to use the same 5 designs because that will just shift inefficiencies elsewhere -- where they're even more expensive. Unnecessarily moving earth or buying more property to fit the 5 mandatory designs is going to be way more expensive than simply building the structure to fit existing limitations.
A more meaningful comparison would be bathroom privileges.
In prison you can pretty much poop or get a drink of water whenever you want. In school you need special permission, and hope the teacher wasn't in a bad mood or that 3 other kids hadn't needed to pee in the last half hour, meeting some mental quota the teacher has for the appropriate # of people that should have to use the toilet during a given period of time.
Seriously, it seemed like a revolutionary concept when I hit college and realized "Hold on, I can just get up & go?." Or that (absent computer labs) I could bring a cup of coffee or bottle of soda with me to class, and that common etiquette even allowed for a bit of food if it wasn't noisy to eat or have a powerful smell.
When I was eight years old I had a teacher who told us that if we needed to use the bathroom, rather than ask "can I use the bathroom?" we should instead say "I'm going to the bathroom". She said she would never stop us from going, but that we should at least let her know why we're leaving the room.
I never got to experience that again at school after I left the second grade.
I like her. Last time I taught HS I told my students that I would never deny them the right to go to the bathroom, but that if they went more than three times in a week (or something) I would send a note to the nurse so she could discuss a possible health issue with them and their parents.
Why would you do that? That doesn't seem very trusting of your students. People need to go to the bathroom several times a day, there's no reason to think that needing to go to the bathroom in your class is an indication of a health issue.
Kids abuse this, I went to an upper middle class Catholic school for middle school, and even there, bathrooms breaks were used as an excuse to go hang out in the bathroom and ultimately culminated in what amounted to a daily fight club, where there was a sense of honor if you got knocked out
Good question. I tried to treat my students as adults, to the occasional chagrin of the administration, as much as possible. I definitely did not trust them—I knew too much—but I tried to pretend that I did. So my ploy was to discourage the students who would otherwise go hang out in the bathroom every single class. Of course one needs to go several times per day. But that does not translate to every time my class meets.
I'm not going to assume anything because it may have just been what you told the children, but if you actually sent notes to the nurse without talking to a kid beforehand, you're definitely overstepping.
It's perfectly normal for bowel movements to be on a schedule. If a student it leaving your class multiple time per week then have a discussion to see what's going on, you might learn something about their life that paints them in a new light. Or, maybe discuss the possibility of going before class starts if possible.
I think people are downvoting your original comment because referring a student directly to the nurse is a strange thing to threaten upfront.
For my context here, I went to a high school that was centered around progressive education principles and I never had to ask to go to the bathroom. There were no disciplinary policies like that. And in fact, everything was fine. We all still worked hard, paid attention, and got our diplomas. I think too many teachers assume students are all malicious gremlins trying as hard as they can to avoid school. Turns out, most adults will start to chafe too if you tell them they have to ask to go to the bathroom after the third time doing so in your presence, let alone if you make them ask every time. And some adults will even use bathroom breaks as an excuse to waste time.
Your school sounds like the sort of place that would select for well behaved children whose parents had the ability and wherewithal to select a progressive school. I don't think policies like that work in schools filled to the brim with students who absolutely do not care about school in the slightest.
Perhaps, but the policies we do have in the US pretty clearly do not work either. Beyond that I think treating children in a humanist fashion is an ethical obligation we hold as adults, but this perspective is apparently quite radical.
People who absolutely do not care about school and don’t want to be there are unlikely to attain much benefit from school. I think this is true no matter how much you try to force them to pay attention, punish them for skipping, leaving class regularly or simply daydreaming while ignoring the instructor. There just isn’t much use imposing the will of an authority on someone who has their own free will which isn’t aligned and doesn’t want to be dominated. In my opinion, success at that sort of endeavor should not be celebrated. A student should only be in school if they want to be there.
Look, I’m with you (although nothing can be “centered around” anything). But most schools are not organized that way, and there’s only so much one teacher can do to buck the system. As it was, I got fired from that particular job after two years, and it wasn’t because I was too strict, certainly.
Not quite sure what you're getting at here but insofar as progressive education was an explicit philosophy reflected in policies and actions, it was centered.
>But most schools are not organized that way, and there’s only so much one teacher can do to buck the system. As it was, I got fired from that particular job after two years, and it wasn’t because I was too strict, certainly.
No disagreement there, and I'm sorry to hear you got fired. I'm sure your students appreciated you doing your part to make things less shitty.
Going to the bathroom more than three times a week means they have a health issue? Seems a bit heavy-handed. Lots of kids get bullied and would rather go to the bathroom during class when no one else is in the bathroom. At some point, it becomes routine so it makes sense that you would go to the bathroom during the same class. That said, my world history class in high school was so boring, I would ask to go to the bathroom and just walk around the school for 10 minutes. It was a couple hours after lunch, so it made sense that I was going number 2.
Getting bullied so much you're afraid to use the bathroom may not be a health issue, but it sure is an issue. If I was a parent I would want to know if that was happening.
No, it doesn't "mean they have a health issue", and I didn't say that it did. Part of the teacher's job is to look for signs of abuse, bullying, and health problems. I'm not a doctor. I see a possible symptom, I'll bring it to the attention of people who can help. If they are using the bathroom frequently because they are being bullied then I am exactly doing my job in the best way possible by alerting the nurse, who can alert the counselor, etc.
That is ridiculous, and exactly the problem I remember from middle school (by high school the teachers had loosened up). 50% of your students are girls experiencing menstruation for the first time. Speaking from experience, in the first few years it pops up by surprise, or use go through pads (teenagers use pads instead of tampons generally, and they go bad more quickky) quicker than you expect. And since you normally change your pad in the morning before school, there’s a fixed window when you need to change it again.
Again speaking from experience, there’s nothing more humiliating than leaving a bloody mark in your desk because your teacher limits bathroom passes. And even if you think that you would make an exception, many well-behaved students won’t speak up, hoping they can make it to the next class. If you’re ‘enlightened’ enough to let your students go to the bathroom three times a week, you’re enlightened enough to call the truants on their BS without penalizing the rest of the class.
I might have been one of those. It took me years to fully internalize that university classes, despite superficial similarity, aren't run by high school rules.
Business school classes were very much like high school, at least the ones I took (I was not a business major). Assigned seats, attendance taken, etc. Don't recall if bathroom trips needed permission as I always handled that before class started.
Math and science classes were generally much more informal. Class met at a specified time and place, and nobody paid much attention to who was there or not. I would occasionally sit in on other classes I was considering taking, to see if I liked the instructor.
> Class met at a specified time and place, and nobody paid much attention to who was there or not
At my university, attendance at lectures and tutorials was optional and no attendance was taken (for most subjects). Most people went to the lectures but attendance at tutorials was much more mixed. I tended to skip tutorials a lot.
I remember one year I promised myself "This year I'm going to turn up to everything". So I went to the first tutorial for one of my CS subjects. The tutor asked us "Is there anything you didn't understand from the lecture?" We all said "No". He said, "Then why did you bother coming to the tutorial?"
Then he told us he was trying to teach himself quantum physics as an excuse to not work on his PhD thesis. He asked us if anyone knew quantum physics. One guy in the class was a physics major and offered to give the tutor a quantum physics lesson. The rest of us just left. And the tutor would have put that down on his timesheet and got paid for it.
I didn't bother going to any more tutorials for that subject.
In hindsight, maybe I should have complained, I probably could have got that tutor in a lot of trouble. But I didn't.
> In hindsight, maybe I should have complained, I probably could have got that tutor in a lot of trouble. But I didn't.
Might be good you didn't. I obviously don't know the particulars here, but I've learned that the attitude of the university teaching staff can be confusing because of non-obvious job reasons.
At my university, there was this PhD having labs with us who I liked - she seemed one of the smarter and wiser of the people I've dealt with up to that point. A year or two after those classes, we ended up having a discussion about upcoming changes in the curriculum. I asked if she'll still be running the same labs she did with us, at which point she almost burst into tears and said something like, "oh god I hope not". I was perplexed by it, until she explained to me that she never wanted these labs, she was forced by her superiors to run them, and they are completely unrelated to the domain of her research. That insight made me understand several other cases of PhDs and professors that seemed incompetent and/or disinterested - it's not that they were bad or stupid; it's because the university mismanaged them into teaching things entirely outside their domain.
I've been an adjunct professor and received that question too. My response is generally "You're the customer here. In my class, you can literally do anything you want if it doesn't interfere with other students learning or me teaching."
Not in the US and not a recent story, but there was a professor in my university who called out a noisy student telling him something in the like of "if you're bored with my lecture, you can do like these guys (pointing at students who were reading comics) and read in silence, or you can just leave, but can you not prevent others from listening?". The funny part is that the ones reading comics thought they were doing it unnoticed.
I will sometimes still announce "I'm going to the bathroom" at work. Not because anyone needs to know, but because it has been so wholly ingrained. I'm just glad I don't impulsively ask for permission.
In the UK in sixth form (the two years prior to university) - speaking from my own experience only of course - we would generally come and go as at university, the only difference being that the teacher might question it, (in contrast to lecturers never caring, at least not in a disciplinary or educational sense) in which case 'just going to the loo/getting a coffee miss' was fine. That's about as in between as I can imagine.
> hope the teacher wasn't in a bad mood or that 3 other kids hadn't needed to pee in the last half hour, meeting some mental quota the teacher has for the appropriate # of people that should have to use the toilet during a given period of time.
This is a fairly reductive statement. Dealing with children is incredibly taxing and difficult. Teachers are [in my country] underpaid and under-appreciated and I believe this kind of rhetoric doesn’t do them justice. People began to appreciate teachers during the pandemic’s home schooling period, but that seems [anecdotally] to have dropped off since children have returned to regular schooling.
> when I hit college and realized "Hold on, I can just get up & go?."
Because you were [likely] an adult now who needs to be able to regulate their own behaviours. No surprise here.
>People began to appreciate teachers during the pandemic’s home schooling period
People began to appreciate them for the daycare aspect and not really teaching. The statement might be reductive, but it's also the experience that many kids have with teachers and school.
The stress level and difficulty of teaching (while accurate statements) are not relevant to this issue. You can't excuse poor treatment of the biological needs of students simply because you have a very difficult job.
My comment was also not a reductive statement when I've been told "no" when I ask to go to the bathroom, or told "3 people have already gone to the bathroom, you'll have to wait until next period."
Both of these specific situations, and variations, happened to me. I watched a classmate pee their pants once when they were denied access to the bathroom.
Want to talk about job stress? Think about the stress an 8 year old goes through when every time they feel their bladder getting full they start worrying about whether they'll be allowed to pee, or have to wait until the next class or recess/lunch, learning nothing in the meantime and hoping they're not the next kid that has to have their parents bring a change of clothes.
I don't know what country you're in. I'm in the US, and quality of pay varies greatly from state to state. Workload (class size) often varies with the socioeconomic status of the people in that school district. What doesn't vary in any conversation I've had with people on this topic is that my experiences are very much not unique.
I may not have been clear with my point that my understanding of the difficulty of teaching in primary (elementary in America?) schools is the children aren’t rationale at that age.
I sympathise with your situation that a child peeing in their pants is not ok under any circumstances. My point was that’s it’s difficult, nigh impossible, to discern between a child copying another’s behaviour and a child in need. This is simply a fact of having 30+ 8 year olds acting as non-rational actors in a classroom setting. This is the point of difference to your original college statement that you could now be considered to act rationally and therefore don’t need to ask permission.
Finally regarding pay, some quick searches show the median income in America to be $60k. My point was that this is indeed undervalued in my opinion when compared to other Industries. You may disagree on that regard, but it’s my opinion understanding what I do about their expected output.
The right take a toilet break anytime is a very basic human need and right. Why would anybody not extend this without question, to kids. Sure, kids at some point might take advantage, but the magic would wear off very quickly. Is like putting a button infront of someone and saying don't press it, they will really want to, and finally pressing it and being underwhelmed. Is lazy caretaking.
> Dealing with children is incredibly taxing and difficult
No surprise it's difficult if you already sour the relationship by treating them poorly and give the kids a reason to hate you from day one. Maybe things will be better if you don't start by making up petty rules that don't help anyone?
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In middle school I remember we had a maths teacher who was very good, in the sense that she let us do pretty much whatever we wanted as long as we weren't disrupting anyone else. This ended up working out well for both sides; those who wanted to learn and engage with the coursework could do so, and those who gave up on it and weren't interested could relax and entertain themselves to make time fly instead of being bored and dreading the class.
In comparison, we had a very severe history teacher, who'd give you spiteful extra assignments (which would escalate further if you didn't do them) if you were lacking in one way or another. Did it help? I don't think so; I remember more about dreading the class and making up excuses/strategies to get away from the class or the assignments than the content of the coursework itself, and I can say for sure that the class was universally hated and dreaded.
> meeting some mental quota the teacher has for the appropriate # of people that should have to use the toilet during a given period of time.
In grade school, every time someone asks permission to use the bathroom they stop the flow of the lesson and valuable time is lost. In college the idea is that most of the students are responsible enough to handle the bathroom and food.
I'm not sure if you're agreeing that students shouldn't have to ask permission. It does interrupt the lesson, after all, and does very little besides reinforcing in children an obedience to authority, even above their own basic biological needs.
That's not a strong argument for strict bathroom rules. That's an argument for guidelines that don't require explicit permission: let kids go any time they want, and they silently signal it by holding up 2 fingers as they get up & go.
And how much valuable time is lost here, weighed against the extreme distraction a student has if they can't go? Besides, once the student has raised their hand and been called on, the flow is already disrupted. Answering "yes" or "no" is irrelevant at that point.
Do you have a proposal that both meets biological needs and doesn't run the minor risk of disruption? Disruptions occur constantly anyway every time a student asks a questions when they don't understand, even when most others do.
I simply fail to see how "stop the flow of the lesson" is either very relevant to unpreventable biological needs, or an unsolvable problem in its own right.
When I was in elementary school, we were told to try to use the bathroom after lunch, or during recess. This was teaching how to plan for what you needed to do and use the opportunities you had to get it done. You had four or five times a day when you could go to the bathroom without needing to be excused from class.
It was actually harder in high school because other than lunch, you had minimal passing time between classes (just a few minutes) so if you stopped to go to the bathroom there was a good chance you'd be late to your next class. And of course no recess. Lunch and P.E. were the two chances you had per day to use the bathroom without having to ask.
I'm all for teaching personal responsibility & planning at a very young age, but I draw the line at expecting control over autonomic functions.
It's fine to ask kids to go when there's specific opportunities, but that doesn't justify restrictive policies during other times: Tiny bladders of small children don't work that way. Especially in grade school, it doesn't need to take more than 15-20 minutes to go from "I'm fine" to "I a really need to go". Especially when bathroom privileges are rationed out & tightly controlled and you become hyper aware of your bladder state. I have my two young kids "do a try" in the bathroom before we leave the house for any car ride. That doesn't stop the occasional "I have to go!" 20 minutes into the trip. And sure enough, at the rest stop it's like my kid turned from a 6 year old into an elephant from the amount that comes out of their body.
When & how quickly you develop the need to urinate depends on a lot of factors: Your specific metabolism, recent activity, what you drank and ate, body position, and probably more. And at some point mentally, you simply pass a threshold where one minute you feel no need to go to the bathroom, and the next minute you do. If that "next minute" occurs 10 minutes after lunch break, so what? What is gained by denying that need?
I agree, and it was never an issue to go at other times you just had to ask and not bolt out of the room. It was never denied. They teachers did encourage you to take advantage of the times when you were already out of the room however.
Yeah I got kicked out of class once in high school (affecting my attendance) because I couldn't hold it until the end of the class, the teacher said no, and my choice was between disobeying or whipping my dick out and peeing on the floor.
I of course chose disobeying, but I'm pretty sure that the teacher would be far less strict in the future if I went the other route.
What crack are you smoking? You simply get up and walk to the restroom like any normal person would. Teachers can largely be ignored, if they physically do anything to you it's lawsuit time.
Have you done that? Sue the powerful (a school board) from a position of powerlessness (black working class in the ghetto)? Probably not, unfair question. Do you really think it is a realistic prospect? Really?
There are toll-free hotlines for reporting teachers engaging in child abuse.
Obstructing a child from using the bathroom who needs to is a form of abuse. If that teacher then physically restrains or otherwise contacts/touches the child to prevent them, especially if it culminates in their wetting/soiling themselves, this starts resembling something along the lines of sexual abuse.
If there's one thing the USA can be relied on it's both society and the law leaning heavily in the direction of protecting the children, to a fault.
This situation is literally just a phone call away from completely ruining the teacher's career if not life.
Have you any data for how well that works for poor black children?
I hear people with theories, but child services the world over are famous for nice theories and systematic abuse. Especially for minority and poor children
So could the former because where I'm from there's a certain amount of times you can not be in a class (without a doctor's note that justifies it) before you face expulsion. IIRC that number is around 20 classes per school year, so that alone brought me to 1/20th of an expulsion.
And being the teen that I was, it's not like I had an otherwise perfect attendance in any of my high school years.
I don't know about how things usually are because my kids aren't in HS yet, but I do know that their school district, during distance learning, has a blanket policy that parents are not allowed to record the teaching sessions. So I wouldn't be too surprised if voice recorders aren't allowed in many schools as well.
I'm no lawyer, but if I had to bet, I would assume that the wiretapping laws that would no doubt zealously be applied to such a recording event (if it ruffled the right feathers) wouldn't have an exception for that, as they were written before even speakerphones came into wide use.
The US, I'd expect. It's very common here, you can generally expect kids to get a lecture, at minimum, if they leave the classroom for any reason without permission.
Is this something that is merely against prison taboos, or would agreeable people in this situation also decide, "It's better for us all to have to hold our poop 23 hours a day than to just bow to the indignity and go when we need to go?" I'm anosmic so for me it would be a no brainer that you go when you need to. The toilet's right there.
Prison food probably means you have to break the taboo some days no matter what.
One of my favorite memories of high school was making guacamole in my physics class. I finished the exam early and had some spare time. Lunch was at 1:30pm and I had breakfast 5:40am most mornings. The teacher walked over, grabbed a chip, scooped up some of the guac, and munched on it. "Luck for you, that's really good. Otherwise I'd kick you out of class"
Yes, meal times for kids in school are also poorly structured, often dictated by over-crowded facilities that can't hold enough people to let everyone eat at a normal lunch time. My kids' school starts at 8:50 am, but one of them has lunch 11:00 a.m. with 4 hours afterwards during which they can't eat. We let him bring a snack and tell him to let his teacher know his parents gave him permission to eat, and they should contact us if there's a problem. Though last year he also had a teacher who recognized the problem and had an unofficial "snack time". Plenty of teachers are not arbitrary & capricious in their rule making.
Although it might make sense to do some research about all this snacking all the time. It seems that while in the 50ies people ate 2-3 times a day nowadays its more like 6-8 times a day and we have a huge epidemic of obesity and diabetes.
4 hours without food seems very short, it only would be a problem if the main food source would be fast carbs which let the blood sugar drop very quickly afterwards.
You should eat 6-8 times a day but smaller meals to prevent obesity. You should also avoid carbs in a majority of your meals and added sugars in all meals. Stick to healthy fats and the obesity problem reduces to none.
Obesity comes from ultimately consuming more calories than calories exerted. Your body learns (maybe this is the wrong word) to store fats when there are long periods of time without eating
I strongly disagree with the 6-8 times, my strategy is one meal a day and it seems to work much better for me.
I strongly agree with the avoiding carbs and sticking to healthy fats and that it reduces the obesity problem to none.
I definitely agree that obesity comes from consuming more calories that exerting.
I strongly disagree that fat gets stored when you don't eat for a longer time. The exact opposite is the case, nothing can be stored when you don't eat. When you rise blood sugar the body releases insulin which is the fat storage hormone. So the less often you do it the less fat gets stored.
I remember sitting in third grade class, red in the face, hand patiently up in the air for minutes straight, simultaneously crying and pissing myself in my chair while Tiffany pointed and laughed at me with her bright red cheeks!
I was a good kid!
If I had of robbed or killed someone and been to Juvenile Hall, my pants would probably have been dry.
There is a middle ground between passive and aggressive called assertive. That is what one should aim for.
The world chews up and spits out good kids. I vowed early on that I wouldn't let anyone shit on me again and it really shaped my early life, not necessarily for the better. I overshot assertive by a decent margin.
Fortunately, I eventually settled into a healthy middle ground. I do wonder if there is a method of preparing "good kids" for the world of shit they are about to encounter in a manner that is a net benefit to them (ie. Not scarred or jaded by it). Not that I'm ever having kids.
Unfortunately, through much of school "assertive" is interpreted as "aggressive" and punished. I would classify it as assertive if a student, after raising their hand without results for a minute, said they had to go to the bathroom & then got up & went to the bathroom.
The teacher on the other hand might decide it was time for a trip to the principal's office & call home to parents because the student caused a disruption to the class by leaving without permission.
I have the same experience. I also overshot "assertive," but the alternative was that everyone would continue to steamroll me to the point of despair. Assertive wasn't enough to safeguard my dignity.
It is indeed exactly as you said. The world chewed me up for being innocent. I was routinely physically assaulted at school. These things were passed off as roughhousing or joking and the adults never intervened, and some even seemed to appreciate the "humor."
The adults rolled their eyes at me essentially for being weak, it was sort of like "sigh, what are we gonna do with that kid?" It occurs to me now that these were bitter, jaded people who hated a child for his naiveté.
If I defended myself, I was the bad guy. At some point I thought: "it doesn't make sense that I am the one who is right and that everyone else is wrong, so maybe I should be more like those guys." But then I got punished too. For example, it was considered funny for people to kick me in the balls at times. It had happened to me 10+ times and nobody got punished. Regrettably, I did it once to another kid and it was a scandal and I got punished.
I am in a healthy place now but I thank God I got through the teen and young adult years without becoming a criminal. I think I easily could have, because I came out of school a deeply damaged individual.
I did weekend classes in elementary school which were two hours, during which our teacher would not let us go to the bathroom. Parents eventually complained and so in exchange for being able to go pee, we were no longer permitted water during the two hours.
Comments here suggest you're in the majority with your experience, though I wonder if there might be a little participation bias with regard to strong memories of such bad policies.
As a contrast, at my school the policy was far more reasonable: you still needed permission to leave, but if you didn't abuse the privilege—using it every day, or disappearing for half the lesson—the teacher wouldn't give you any grief.
That sounds like a very similar policy to the one the parent described. Essentially, it's up to the teacher to decide. Unless they codified what "abuse the privilege" meant, you're still at the mercy of a teacher's whims.
I'd say "judgment" rather than the significantly more loaded "whims", but you're right, the policy still relies on a human arbiter.
A codified system is bound to introduce problems: 'You get one bathroom break during class per week, and you've used yours, but this is an emergency? Sorry, I trust you, but the system says I have to give you detention if you go.'
My point was that the problem was with GP's specific (though perhaps commonplace) school culture/teachers, not the general idea of requiring permission.
Things seem to have changes for the better since my time: How old are you? < 30? I have two kids in grammar school right now & they no longer face this same type of issue, but I also don't know if that's a local change or a more general re-think on students' biological needs.
30 on the dot, but my school was pretty liberal/progressive/what-have-you, so that may have helped. Hopefully considering those needs is more commonplace now, and folks won't have horror stories in the future.
I've been on a city bus several times when the driver just pulled over, turned off the engine, said "I'm going to the bathroom", entered the business he'd parked in front of, and came back after a couple of minutes. It didn't cause a problem, so municipalities who don't allow that are abusive. I'm sure that in general drivers try to keep that to a minimum.
But often there's too few bathrooms for too many children, so they can't go in those five minutes when they're supposed to. That was my experience at least.
1) Adult bladders are larger, we're more experienced in judging the severity of our needs so we're unlikely to hold it to the point of physical injury. In kids, especially when they've been trained to artificially "hold it in" by schools, they become less sensitized to their needs and can develop problems ranging from UTI's to incontinence.
2) Teachers went to the bathroom all of the time when I was in school, they'd pull the school nurse, or a secretary, or teacher's assistant from somewhere to watch the class for a few minutes.
3) Taxi drivers can stop in between trips.
4a) Bus drivers on long-hauls can stop at rest stops, and do so regularly both for themselves & their passengers.
4b) Apart from city buses, many buses (like Greyhounds) have a bathroom on board so a rest stop isn't even required, just a pull off to the side of the road & take their keys with them to the back of the bus
4c) Buses that run frequent stop local routes, There's generally a place to go at each end of the route, but there is actually employer abuse in this area with schedules so tight and penalties for running behind schedule meaning the have a place to go is only one of the concerns. Wearing adult diapers isn't uncommon, and transit unions routinely fight for bathroom rights. But this awful situation for a certain group of workers is not at all a justification for inflicting similar constraints on other people, much less children with developing bodies.
School was pretty good about letting kids go to the bathroom. I only remember one or two times that people were denied (they were misbehaving).
There was one time a kid got denied wrongfully because the teacher thought he was part of a group that was causing trouble right before that. He had a half-empty Gatorade bottle in his backpack from lunch... he was sitting in the back of class and chugged it while the teacher wasn't looking. He then refilled it with a different yellow liquid, if you know what I mean. I'm a bit surprised the teacher didn't catch him and that nobody freaked out and snitched.
A few months ago I heard of a school in Berlin that removed toilet paper from the bathrooms and forced kids to go to the janitor to get their three sheets of toilet paper per day. And as icing on the cake the janitor didn't acknowledge that teenage girls need more paper than boys.
This story aired in TV and probably it's no longer the case. Also it likely bends the truth a bit, but nevertheless this is so unsettling and absurd that I wanted to share it.
I know it is bad for kids, but it really sucked as a teacher, too.
I substitute taught for a few years after college, and you can't leave the classroom at all except during your prep period. It was really bad some days.
In Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn notes that denying prisoners the right to go to the bathroom during lengthy interrogations was a standard tactic, and a surprisingly effective one. The shame of soiling ourselves is so deeply ingrained in us that many people will confess to things they didn't do just to avoid it, even when they know the consequence is years in the Gulag.
Prison maybe, but don’t forget about jails. I’ve visited jails in panopticon “pod” setups for 40–50-ish people bunked two-each in rooms with no bars (just a painted line dividing cells from common areas) that had a single separate common restroom/shower where each trip must be requested and approved. San Francisco’s jail is like that.
Authoritarianism in schools sucks, but bathroom privileges aren't a great comparison.
In the US, most prisons have an open, bare toilet in the cell shared by a few cell mates. Even if one can technically use it whenever, according to what @throwaway998662 says, in practice this means you can only crap during the 1-2 hours a day when your cell mate(s) are gone.
Yeah, you could get a capricious teacher that says "no" when you ask, but that doesn't seem like much in comparison to the degradation and potential for violence of using the toilet in prison...
Little freedoms like this, and just being treated like a sane, rational human being were the difference between me doing horribly in school and not giving a shit about anything and excelling in school and loving learning. Plus, for some reason having the freedom to fail and having nobody care made an entire world of a difference for me and was the reason I grew to love academics and learning.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 380 ms ] threadThe place has long since been demolished; I remember it from personal experience as a shopping centre where all the shops had closed, and as a car park where nobody parked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricorn_Centre
The depressing nature of a lot of brutalist architecture (especially that created by governments) is the uniformity, homogeneity and the mass-produced faux-utilitarian feeling it evokes, as if the inhabitants are all interchangeable peons with no individual spirit. It's a reminder of the depressing local conditions that lead to that architecture coming into being in the first place.
https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2016/jan/13/brut...
It's worth noting that Phil is not just wrong about brutalism but also wrong about these examples being (primarily) brutalist. Not generally using raw concrete, they would not be considered brutalist. The modern "box" has been largely discarded by contemporary institutional architects in favor of rough, pseudo-gabbled, uh, crap, as shown in the majority of these examples.
I'd say a bad brutalist building is like a rough bureaucratic dictate whereas present bad institutional architecture is like a bureaucratic dictate but rewritten with contemporary niceness guides - "this is a notice concerning your rights under the involuntary amputation act"
https://res.cloudinary.com/schoolprison/7_pexlbe.jpg
Boring? Yes. Cold and functional? Sure. Just not brutalist.
Brutalist architecture is often considered soulless, but soullessness (in and of itself) !== brutalism.
[0] https://res.cloudinary.com/schoolprison/10_wwfagw.jpg (which was a school)
There is a simple fact that schools can be glorified daycare so that workers can offload the burden of childcare. For this purpose, a prison makes sense. Despite not being the most humane considering the kids didn’t do any crime worthy of rehabilitation.
aka "this is why we can't have nice things", juvenile edition :)
Sugar = good is no longer an appropriate heuristic given the change in nutritional availability - in fact it is now harmful - so we force kids to behave differently.
It's not clear that school is similar. Is it not the case that people learn better when they are adequately stimulated and engaged? Even if not, how far should we go in making kids miserable to force them to learn more? Do we need to make them miserable or is there an alternative? This is what I mean by asking why, and it's not clear to me what all the answers are (it's a very complex question).
I have literally ZERO sympathy for any teacher who has shitty (haha) bathroom policies.
Stopping making a big deal out of it will remove the disruption factor. If you can just get up and leave and nobody pays attention the act will quickly lose its effect.
> to get out of class
This suggests there's a bigger problem there if people are so desperate to get out as to fake a bathroom break, but anyway, why not let them? What's the harm? If these people are bored/disgruntled/etc then you already lost the game and no amount of force or coercion will change their mind.
This is why we can't have streets... ?!?
Jokes aside, you just provided a very good example of the prison mindset:
Instead of trying to understand the "problem" of students going too often to the bathroom, the default choice is to make the behavior prohibited.
A bit like https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Kilmainh...
In his book "Discipline and Punish", Foucault argues that in the establishment of the modern prison, the mission of imprisonment shifted from punishing those who were imprisoned to reforming and disciplining them to become better citizens. The same organizing principles of command and control developed for "modern" prisons were applied to the "modern" school as well. I thought the game eerily demonstrated how similar prisons and schools look to one another. Both kinds of buildings are designed to limit access to the building and also egress.
The reason schools operate that way is simple: sheer inertia combined with just being impervious to reform.
This is the problem with attributing purposes for which our ancestors never intended.
Indeed there is no mention of Foucault in that article. I read through her blog more and this is the first one I found that mentions the book in question http://hackeducation.com/2020/07/20/surveillance (also an interesting read)
You don't know much about prisons seems to me. As in, once one know just a little how it functions, the above sounds either extraordinary stupid.
I imagine that you mean that tall buildings maximize ground area, and that most property is rectangular.
The way to maximize volume to surface area is to build spheres, or cubes if you're forced to remain rectilinear, but tall buildings optimize for ground area.
OP is entirely correct, and no one misunderstood the point OP was making. You are simultaneously being needlessly pedantic, and less than charitable by needlessly interpreting inconsequential ambiguities in OPs sentence in a way that would have made them incorrect.
Someone else commented on the downvotes on your post being wrong, the above is why I downvoted you.
Some of that's land, but some is also the design and construction. You're probably hiring a design firm that specializes in building efficient brick box schools and similar institutional projects, maybe with a big glass atrium to have one showcase area, and they've got that design patten pretty well nailed down.
When you have space, you get sprawling flat schools. Still probably a brick box, but not a tall one. My school had large portions that were only one floor tall, and one area that stacked two floors. They've since knocked it down and replaced it with a 3-story building, because now they need more capacity and no longer had space to keep tacking additions on.
Would it have used a smaller footprint to stack it taller to begin with? Sure, but the building lot wasn't the liming factor, budget was.
Dial it back.
When I hear "most volume per surface area" I think of dome architecture, and anyone with even a slight interest in geometry or architecture would probably think similarly.
I wasn't being rude, I was helping explain their point because the words they used didn't match the ideas they meant to convey.
Here's the chapter of his book about the nature of certain building styles and shapes being important here...
https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.disciplineAndPunish...
Also interesting to talk about, are the ways that the people influenced by Foucault talk about space, area, and architectural design. Deleuze and Guattari had a whole lot to say about all of those topics, and they are one of the principle reasons for Foucaults fame...
You can deconstruct the whole of society and make an argument that all labor exchanged for capital is oppression, that all regular chronologies favored by the dominant culture is oppression, that all authority figures are oppressive etc... But it's difficult to imagine a thriving, post-industrial society not featuring some of those things.
Even looking back in history, people have self-organized into hierarchical, regimented systems. I think a lot of this is just a natural reaction to our environment, which is also dictated by regular chronologies (days, lunar cycle, seasons), necessary labor (biological need for food and shelter) and implicit authority figures (parents).
It might be possible to make a space launch vehicle that's short and squat, or operate a factory without any regular worker hours, but it's going to have some costs compared to our current equilibrium
when my kids miss school, they have to catch up the work they missed. if they already struggle then they can't afford to get sick because they will fall to far behind and may not be able to catch up.
so yes, school is forced labor and it's a prison
So it's in my experience totally untrue to suggest that any child would have to "catch up" any learning missed due to sickness (and also reveals that schools are talking bollocks when they suggest that taking a few days off to go on holiday during termtime will have any noticeable adverse effect, but shhhh)
Sometimes it's ridiculous-- my then-4th grader was taking Algebra I on the side, and had shown mastery on the 4th grade fraction curriculum on a test, but getting the large packet of fraction work that he missed during an absence was considered critically important. :P
> reveals that schools are talking bollocks when they suggest that taking a few days off to go on holiday during termtime
I do think that the kind of attitude that lets you ignore a bit of schooling here and there for a convenient vacation schedule does affect outcomes, though. I teach at a private school, but I think we're both aware of incentives for attendance, the reasons for them, and the areas in which they cause perverse outcomes.
But it does seem true, from the point of view of parents and children. It doesn't matter that the curriculum is helical and revisits the same topics multiple times. It doesn't revisit the same topics multiple time in a single semester, which means the kid doesn't get a second chance to learn a topic within the grading scope, which means they have to catch up or risk a lower grade. As much as we say that it's the education that matters, as much as it should matter - it doesn't. What matters are the grades. At the very least, in my experience, most parents have grade expectations, and the kid will suffer negative consequences this semester if they fall back, even though they may recover by the end of the education level (where again, the final grades are all that matters).
(Even though the immediate pressure may come from the parents, it's in a control loop with the grades, so the school can't pretend this is not happening.)
As a parent, if my 4th or 6th grader got a lower grade due to missing homework as a result of being sick, it wouldn't concern me.
In high school it starts to matter more due to grades being a component of college admissions, but unless you're targeting really elite schools a couple of days of missed work isn't going to move the needle much. And if you are targeting elite schools, you're already working very hard and including a lot of AP courses and extracuricular activities and you will just buckle down and make up the work.
Kids can actually take free days off. They don't actually have to do everything that was done while they have been away, usually we have done just small portion of it. Kids that struggle just continues struggling and kids that perceive school easy just continue lazying around.
In no way will few days off make you fall behind.
Also, you may have a job where none of your responsibilities are unique to you, but that's not often the case outside of some types of shift work. If I take a vacation or sick days, I have catching up to do. No one is going to step in for a couple of days and pickup where I left off on a project I've been working on for 3 months.
As for missing school, my kids go to typical mediocre public schools. When a student is struggling, they're given a little extra help. When they miss because they're sick, they're given plenty of time to makeup the work. And if a student is struggling so much that they can't reasonably move on to the next year's more complex material, the school literally devotes and extra year if resources to
I'm not debating the merits of Montessori schools. I'm saying the "missing time" aspect of your comment does not have a good analog from work to learning. That's all.
missing time means, that you need to work overtime to make up for it.
at work this is not normally the case. if the work can't be done by someone else, then it will simply be delayed. the timing changes. same with montessori learning. you will simply delay all your learning by a few days. which is not a problem at all because everyone is learning at their own pace anyways.
contrast that with traditional schooling where overtime is the only way to catch up with your classmates
in that environment how do you take a vacation? sure a planned downtime is easier than an unplanned one but the process is the same.
in a programming team other team members pick up tasks.
if my assistant is away, i may have to do some things myself.
if i am sick, my customers will just have to wait. if i set my deadlines to short, not giving any buffer time, it's my fault.
yes, there may be catch up type work, but usually i am not compelled to work overtime, which is how kids catch up time looks like.
they are forced to catch up on their own time, not in class and they are not given a choice.
I don't think this is why kids go to school. You go to school because you have to. There is no realistic option not to go. If you don't go, then you'll be forcefully put into a school for troubled kids. Even if you don't consider the above, there is still an enormous social pressure to go to school too.
I hate the current system but I also want my kids to be socialised and have friends.
I'd definitely pay a private company providing "home schooling" and using a different model of education where kids are learning by doing instead of memorising crap and at the same time can share a location with other kids of the same age (+ a few tutor available to unblock kids when needed but not delivering frontal lessons).
"The Montessori method of education is an educational method developed by Italian physician Maria Montessori. Emphasizing independence, it views children as naturally eager for knowledge and capable of initiating learning in a sufficiently supportive and well-prepared learning environment. It discourages some conventional measures of achievement, such as grades and tests."
I don't have any first-hand knowledge of how such initiatives work in practice; but at a high level, it's like home-schooling with more community involvement and socialization, as well as off-site learning experiences. I've also heard of some families who do half-and-half between a formal school environment, and unschooling/homeschooling.
That's not my takeaway, after looking at these photos though.
Look at brutalist building as another example.
efficiency doesn't stop with a building's dimensions. efficiency demands social control. it doesn't care whether that happens through self-control and self-discipline or through domination.
I've spent extensive time in all of these except prisons, and I can tell you the difference is stark. What explains that? Is it all just down to expensive trim and interior decor? I'm sure that plays a part, but that was never my main impression. Instead, it comes down to the layout and light and feel: it's clear when a building, however regular and rectangular, is designed to support and empower the occupants and when it's designed to control and direct.
Tall office buildings may often have open plan, but this should be attributed to the fitout builder’s client (e.g. SomeCrazySoftwateCompany as the incoming tenant), not the building builder’s client (e.g. SomeGroupInvestmentCompany the owner of the building)
Update: Marcuse was a Jew, actually. My bad. I'd misremembered this from Martin Jay's book.
More or less the entire French Intellectual establishment argued at that time for "the decriminalization of all consensual relations between adults and minors below the age of fifteen".
While I agree that seems extremely stupid, it is based on a morally tenable argument that people under that age could give consent. That may be incorrect but if accepted as a premise would justify their position.
So if Foucault believed this and his moral arguments derived from that, it would seem unwise to dismiss all his moral authority just because you believe he was wrong on this point.
I personally think he is totally wrong and that even people at the age of eighteen struggle to know their own minds clearly with regard to consent. However I do not as a result think Foucault is impossible to take a moral lead from.
Then the question is, how does one become intellectual establishement. Sounds like dissenters were somehow excluded from that nebulous subjective category.
Louis Aragon, Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Leiris, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Philippe Sollers, Jacques Rancière, Jean-François Lyotard, Francis Ponge, Bernard Besret
If your (or their, the french intellectual elite's/literati's) philosophy is so morally vacuous that it fails to recognize the sexual exploitation of children and young teenagers as reprehensible, then it is worth less than nothing. It is an evil.
Consent is not enough, is the common modern view. Power structures and actual power matters too.
In some sense, surely advocating (almost successfully, if I recall correctly) for a repeal of age of consent laws must be worse than the crime itself. That is, if we are of the opinion that pedophilia is wrong. Consider the difference between orchestrating many murders and a single murder as an analogy.
No, Foucault (and the others on that list) have been let off the hook for too long. The aesthetician in me is horrified, youth is beauty and they want it defiled?
And a disclaimer; I am of course a conservative in every sense of the word, and this is my perspective.
Talking about power structures while criticizing Foucault is pretty rich.
Its still wrong, but anachronistically wrong a bit like how many elements the founding fathers put in which are good government but did so under the unforgivable sin of slavery. If that's too 'ancient history' for you, let's consider Brendan Eich's contribution to Firefox but also understand he is a homophobe. We can still use and appreciate Firefox's technical advancements without worrying about Eich's homophobia.
Age of consent skeptics are as old as time anyway. It rages on today in the modern libertarian party and incel culture. Anti-authoritarian and reactionary movements often become victimizers of children and women and racial/religious minorities because these groups are often protected by authority. When you remove authority, suddenly they are powerless and easy prey to whatever replaces that authority. The most obvious example are soldiers raping women in towns they take over.
Not all criticism is moral criticism.
Foucault seemed to think it was, if not proper behaviour, then at least not-unproper. That is a moral judgement.
To suggest that Foucault was above the entire concept of morals as I understand you to do, well I can't agree on that and I don't think he would either. Of course he was trying to be a moral authority, remember that this whole thing was about him (and others) attempting to legalize sexual relations with children. If he did not think himself an authority, on what merit would he petition? And barring that, it is clear that he was and maybe is an authority, because here we are half a century later or so still discussing his position.
His experiences does not excuse him in my eyes. Neither does it impact to the slightest degree the truth-value of his position on this issue, nor of his philosophy overall.
It may be a moral issue, but there are pragmatic or non-moral reasons one may argue as Foucault did. You may find those reasons detestable and disgusting. That doesn't mean he was making any appeal to moral sentiment - he was just acting on what he finds beneficial or detrimental. Whether on behalf of sympathy for prisoners against the carceral state, or another reason.
>If he did not think himself an authority, on what merit would he petition?
He can do so not speaking on moral authority, but on a variety of authorities - the authority of a public intellectual, for instance. I don't think he was being a moral leader, or attempting to be. The people who would listen to him, the public at large, would not do so because of his moral position in their eyes. An authority as an enduring public intellectual with a strong grasp on philosophy and sociology within his tradition, for sure. A moral authority? Nobody has ever quoted Foucault in such a way.
His experiences would not excuse him (in your view; in mine, there is little to need an excuse if you examine his intentions), but they would provide a rational explanation for why he would forgo morality to expound his own opinions in pragmatic or non-moral reasons. He may have just not cared about morality (the same system that troubled him, I don't know) and reasoned on his feelings and pragmatism alone. I'm not trying to excuse him, I'm trying to explain him, though I'm really just speculating.
I suppose maybe there is some truth to it. But he's highly disingenuous with his implications. It's like a Twitter hot-take that's expanded into a book. Hard libertarians might argue that taxation is in some way equivalent to slavery, which is also technically true but a very biased presentation of the facts. Schools and hospitals are similar to prisons in the same way taxation is similar to slavery (you can find similarities, but ignoring the differences is just asinine).
Every right requires responsibilities. If students have a right to learn, then schools have a responsibility to teach them. If young adults have a right to be educated in a broad range of topics (many of which did not interest them as children) then children have a responsibility to learn. Control is all about forcing people to take responsibility, because otherwise rights will be unfulfilled.
The question isn't whether control exists (it can and should) but whether the intent and implementation is just and efficient. A communist dictator can claim the right to a huge portion of the country's wealth while its population starves, this would be unjust.
There are valid questions to ask about control. Is it better to control inputs or outputs? Is it better to have a rule of laws and systems, or a rule of individuals with authority - discretion means giving more power to individuals. Are the trade-offs our society makes currently fair and worthwhile? If a punishment keeps the majority of the population responsible (thus giving creating rights) but hurts the occasional person who is somehow resistant to control is it a bad thing? But simply assuming that control is bad is silly.
He traces the design we all see in the downtowns to the works of early german communists and their desire for good looking spaces and architecture that could cheaply be made for the masses in the coming revolution of the working classes. When capitalists heard about it they stopped listening after 'cheap' was uttered. "Oh, this is the 'modern' look and it's the new thing and it's cheap? Do 'em all like that then."
My recollection of Wolfe's short piece is a bit dated, but that's the theme as I remember. It's a short and fun little satirical look at how the 80's downtowns got to be looking as such.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House
As an aside, I wonder how Minecraft is going to change the look of architects and cities in the future. I'm dead certain that the architects of the 2070s will have gotten their love of design in Minecraft.
A lot of palaces, museums, galleries, opera houses, universities and houses of government share the same basic layout. You’d be hard pressed to say what the function of the Palace of Westminster was if you didn’t know. It certainly looks a lot like some schools and universities.
Which looks really nice for a prison. I suspect it is an administrative building, or just the entrance. Not the place where inmates actually live.
School buildings move their entire populations through the entrance in the space of 10 minutes. Prisons are more-or-less entirely designed to prevent exactly that from happening.
At least it had three different exits.
When I bounced around cities later in life, I was surprised at how many of my peers said the same thing as a conversation piece.
Maybe they used the same governmental bidding process. "Needed: a building. One food preparation and eating area. Hallways suitable for lining up and proceeding in rows with many small rooms. One yard with sporting facilities."
Both university level and lower education levels in the US will probably have large security camera systems. I know some smaller schools can't quite afford it but the medium and large state schools can.
As other people have commented, space for windows is crucial. (And, at least 2 of the pictures had identifying words in different languages) I scored 10 out of 10 and the game bounced me out.
For example:
* https://hidden-london.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/geograp... vs https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/James_Ho...
* https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article1185483.ece/ALT... vs https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Cefn_Sae...
* https://ukhumanrightsblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/HM_... vs https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c5/We...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consortium_of_Local_Authorit...
There are, on the other hand, lots of practical problems with this kind of building. The flat roofs have a tendency to leak, they're decades past their design life, thermal control is poor, they're riddled with asbestos, and a number of other issues. And lots of people think they're ugly. But this doesn't make them inhuman, just a flawed solution to a real-world problem.
I think it's easy to forget just what difficulties the UK was in for building in the 1950s and 1960s. There was a spectacular shortage of housing (a baby boom and the effects of WW2 bombing didn't help) and a chronic shortage of both money and skilled labour for building. There is, bluntly, no way that enough traditional brick and stone buildings could have been put up for there to be enough schools. So you can certainly argue that better cheap and/or mass produced buildings should have been made, or that the aesthetics were bad, but writing off all the architecture without understanding its context is unhelpful.
[Edit: in my view, the most inhuman feature of the images is the fencing, but that is almost certainly not original - security in schools was really stepped up from the 1990s onwards]
It doesn't age particularly well, though
That's subjective, but I can't say I like any of them
Point being that you can cherry pick any answer
You can read “学校” on this building, making it a bit easier than it should be. :)
A school building could provide maximum natural light to the occupants. For example, it could have shape and orientation so most of its windows get sunlight throughout the year. Interior spaces can have skylights and be used for short-duration activities like restrooms, locker rooms, and equipment storage.
But naked capitalism tells women to "lean in and earn $1 for every 70 cents" instead of telling men to "lean out and earn 70c for every $1" ...and spend more time with your children, family, contributing to open source software, learning science, an instrument, hobbies, sports and exercise and doing other things not valued by the market.
UBI is far superior to both a jobs guarantee, minimum wage laws and unions in rebalancing the power dynamic between the employees and employers.
Instead, today, we are brainwashed that your worth as an individual comes from working for a corporation, and the schools train the kids to sit down and shut up for 10 hours day to do just that. Look at Finland. Or http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158
Paperwork specifically is also pretty important. Sure you could argue that they could postpone teaching that until later but teaching how to fill out paperwork is basically just teaching how to do homework which will be essential for teaching mathematics at any reasonable scale.
Of course now things are digital but it's still the same skills but in a different shade.
Money is just a currency. What they really love (and need), is all the goods and services that can be purchased by money, which include the things that keep their children and themselves alive.
I sometimes wonder if it’s down to a fundamentally different experience at schools in the US that I’m not aware of?
I feel like I went in one end of the school system, and then came out twelve years later able to read, write, play musical instruments, understand the natural world, think critically, use a computer, and generally having a wide variety of other skills. Teaching quality was mostly fine, with staff who seemed to be pretty engaged. I spent plenty of time outside school with both parents, and I came out with a bunch of skills and knowledge that neither of them would have been able to teach me. My experience was far from perfect, but it was a million miles away from being “a prison”.
The “school is a waste of time” argument seems to be popular in these circles. Is it down to cultural differences? Or maybe it’s just the iceberg tip of a deeper and more earnestly held view about a fundamental restructuring of society and childhood?
For what it is worth, pandemic made me appreciate teachers more. Pandemic made my kids appreciate school more (and they explicitly stated multiple points where school is better then what went on at home).
i would rather the state appoint an architect group to design like 5 model schools that are modular. and then any time a city needs to build one you just get to play some lego on the modular design. this would make school construction faster and cheaper and maintenance easier
The specific point of the parent comment is that they do want a cookie cutter school. Saying "no one wants that" isn't really a substantial counter argument.
I suppose the problem with them all being so similar would be if you spent every day visiting a different one, you would tire of them all being them same. But no one does that - you spend many years in a single one, without much awareness of others. In the end it's important that it's effective to spend long periods in, and its uniqueness is basically irrelevant to the people that actually use it.
There's a long list of reasons schools aren't just a cleared field with a bunch of mobile-unit classrooms thrown out there despite that being the most cost-effective way to house classes.
Land isn't uniform, lots have shapes, roads already exist, utilities have to be connected, local construction requirements vary, existing structures have to be accounted for. You're likely not going to save money by forcing everyone to use the same 5 designs because that will just shift inefficiencies elsewhere -- where they're even more expensive. Unnecessarily moving earth or buying more property to fit the 5 mandatory designs is going to be way more expensive than simply building the structure to fit existing limitations.
In prison you can pretty much poop or get a drink of water whenever you want. In school you need special permission, and hope the teacher wasn't in a bad mood or that 3 other kids hadn't needed to pee in the last half hour, meeting some mental quota the teacher has for the appropriate # of people that should have to use the toilet during a given period of time.
Seriously, it seemed like a revolutionary concept when I hit college and realized "Hold on, I can just get up & go?." Or that (absent computer labs) I could bring a cup of coffee or bottle of soda with me to class, and that common etiquette even allowed for a bit of food if it wasn't noisy to eat or have a powerful smell.
I never got to experience that again at school after I left the second grade.
It's perfectly normal for bowel movements to be on a schedule. If a student it leaving your class multiple time per week then have a discussion to see what's going on, you might learn something about their life that paints them in a new light. Or, maybe discuss the possibility of going before class starts if possible.
I think people are downvoting your original comment because referring a student directly to the nurse is a strange thing to threaten upfront.
So be it! That's life.
Not quite sure what you're getting at here but insofar as progressive education was an explicit philosophy reflected in policies and actions, it was centered.
>But most schools are not organized that way, and there’s only so much one teacher can do to buck the system. As it was, I got fired from that particular job after two years, and it wasn’t because I was too strict, certainly.
No disagreement there, and I'm sorry to hear you got fired. I'm sure your students appreciated you doing your part to make things less shitty.
It only takes a few to ruin it for everybody.
Again speaking from experience, there’s nothing more humiliating than leaving a bloody mark in your desk because your teacher limits bathroom passes. And even if you think that you would make an exception, many well-behaved students won’t speak up, hoping they can make it to the next class. If you’re ‘enlightened’ enough to let your students go to the bathroom three times a week, you’re enlightened enough to call the truants on their BS without penalizing the rest of the class.
Business school classes were very much like high school, at least the ones I took (I was not a business major). Assigned seats, attendance taken, etc. Don't recall if bathroom trips needed permission as I always handled that before class started.
Math and science classes were generally much more informal. Class met at a specified time and place, and nobody paid much attention to who was there or not. I would occasionally sit in on other classes I was considering taking, to see if I liked the instructor.
At my university, attendance at lectures and tutorials was optional and no attendance was taken (for most subjects). Most people went to the lectures but attendance at tutorials was much more mixed. I tended to skip tutorials a lot.
I remember one year I promised myself "This year I'm going to turn up to everything". So I went to the first tutorial for one of my CS subjects. The tutor asked us "Is there anything you didn't understand from the lecture?" We all said "No". He said, "Then why did you bother coming to the tutorial?"
Then he told us he was trying to teach himself quantum physics as an excuse to not work on his PhD thesis. He asked us if anyone knew quantum physics. One guy in the class was a physics major and offered to give the tutor a quantum physics lesson. The rest of us just left. And the tutor would have put that down on his timesheet and got paid for it.
I didn't bother going to any more tutorials for that subject.
In hindsight, maybe I should have complained, I probably could have got that tutor in a lot of trouble. But I didn't.
Might be good you didn't. I obviously don't know the particulars here, but I've learned that the attitude of the university teaching staff can be confusing because of non-obvious job reasons.
At my university, there was this PhD having labs with us who I liked - she seemed one of the smarter and wiser of the people I've dealt with up to that point. A year or two after those classes, we ended up having a discussion about upcoming changes in the curriculum. I asked if she'll still be running the same labs she did with us, at which point she almost burst into tears and said something like, "oh god I hope not". I was perplexed by it, until she explained to me that she never wanted these labs, she was forced by her superiors to run them, and they are completely unrelated to the domain of her research. That insight made me understand several other cases of PhDs and professors that seemed incompetent and/or disinterested - it's not that they were bad or stupid; it's because the university mismanaged them into teaching things entirely outside their domain.
This is a fairly reductive statement. Dealing with children is incredibly taxing and difficult. Teachers are [in my country] underpaid and under-appreciated and I believe this kind of rhetoric doesn’t do them justice. People began to appreciate teachers during the pandemic’s home schooling period, but that seems [anecdotally] to have dropped off since children have returned to regular schooling.
> when I hit college and realized "Hold on, I can just get up & go?."
Because you were [likely] an adult now who needs to be able to regulate their own behaviours. No surprise here.
People began to appreciate them for the daycare aspect and not really teaching. The statement might be reductive, but it's also the experience that many kids have with teachers and school.
My comment was also not a reductive statement when I've been told "no" when I ask to go to the bathroom, or told "3 people have already gone to the bathroom, you'll have to wait until next period."
Both of these specific situations, and variations, happened to me. I watched a classmate pee their pants once when they were denied access to the bathroom.
Want to talk about job stress? Think about the stress an 8 year old goes through when every time they feel their bladder getting full they start worrying about whether they'll be allowed to pee, or have to wait until the next class or recess/lunch, learning nothing in the meantime and hoping they're not the next kid that has to have their parents bring a change of clothes.
I don't know what country you're in. I'm in the US, and quality of pay varies greatly from state to state. Workload (class size) often varies with the socioeconomic status of the people in that school district. What doesn't vary in any conversation I've had with people on this topic is that my experiences are very much not unique.
I wish that had resulted in a lawsuit.
I sympathise with your situation that a child peeing in their pants is not ok under any circumstances. My point was that’s it’s difficult, nigh impossible, to discern between a child copying another’s behaviour and a child in need. This is simply a fact of having 30+ 8 year olds acting as non-rational actors in a classroom setting. This is the point of difference to your original college statement that you could now be considered to act rationally and therefore don’t need to ask permission.
Finally regarding pay, some quick searches show the median income in America to be $60k. My point was that this is indeed undervalued in my opinion when compared to other Industries. You may disagree on that regard, but it’s my opinion understanding what I do about their expected output.
No surprise it's difficult if you already sour the relationship by treating them poorly and give the kids a reason to hate you from day one. Maybe things will be better if you don't start by making up petty rules that don't help anyone?
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In middle school I remember we had a maths teacher who was very good, in the sense that she let us do pretty much whatever we wanted as long as we weren't disrupting anyone else. This ended up working out well for both sides; those who wanted to learn and engage with the coursework could do so, and those who gave up on it and weren't interested could relax and entertain themselves to make time fly instead of being bored and dreading the class.
In comparison, we had a very severe history teacher, who'd give you spiteful extra assignments (which would escalate further if you didn't do them) if you were lacking in one way or another. Did it help? I don't think so; I remember more about dreading the class and making up excuses/strategies to get away from the class or the assignments than the content of the coursework itself, and I can say for sure that the class was universally hated and dreaded.
In grade school, every time someone asks permission to use the bathroom they stop the flow of the lesson and valuable time is lost. In college the idea is that most of the students are responsible enough to handle the bathroom and food.
And how much valuable time is lost here, weighed against the extreme distraction a student has if they can't go? Besides, once the student has raised their hand and been called on, the flow is already disrupted. Answering "yes" or "no" is irrelevant at that point.
Do you have a proposal that both meets biological needs and doesn't run the minor risk of disruption? Disruptions occur constantly anyway every time a student asks a questions when they don't understand, even when most others do.
I simply fail to see how "stop the flow of the lesson" is either very relevant to unpreventable biological needs, or an unsolvable problem in its own right.
It was actually harder in high school because other than lunch, you had minimal passing time between classes (just a few minutes) so if you stopped to go to the bathroom there was a good chance you'd be late to your next class. And of course no recess. Lunch and P.E. were the two chances you had per day to use the bathroom without having to ask.
It's fine to ask kids to go when there's specific opportunities, but that doesn't justify restrictive policies during other times: Tiny bladders of small children don't work that way. Especially in grade school, it doesn't need to take more than 15-20 minutes to go from "I'm fine" to "I a really need to go". Especially when bathroom privileges are rationed out & tightly controlled and you become hyper aware of your bladder state. I have my two young kids "do a try" in the bathroom before we leave the house for any car ride. That doesn't stop the occasional "I have to go!" 20 minutes into the trip. And sure enough, at the rest stop it's like my kid turned from a 6 year old into an elephant from the amount that comes out of their body.
When & how quickly you develop the need to urinate depends on a lot of factors: Your specific metabolism, recent activity, what you drank and ate, body position, and probably more. And at some point mentally, you simply pass a threshold where one minute you feel no need to go to the bathroom, and the next minute you do. If that "next minute" occurs 10 minutes after lunch break, so what? What is gained by denying that need?
I of course chose disobeying, but I'm pretty sure that the teacher would be far less strict in the future if I went the other route.
Have you done that? Sue the powerful (a school board) from a position of powerlessness (black working class in the ghetto)? Probably not, unfair question. Do you really think it is a realistic prospect? Really?
Obstructing a child from using the bathroom who needs to is a form of abuse. If that teacher then physically restrains or otherwise contacts/touches the child to prevent them, especially if it culminates in their wetting/soiling themselves, this starts resembling something along the lines of sexual abuse.
If there's one thing the USA can be relied on it's both society and the law leaning heavily in the direction of protecting the children, to a fault.
This situation is literally just a phone call away from completely ruining the teacher's career if not life.
I hear people with theories, but child services the world over are famous for nice theories and systematic abuse. Especially for minority and poor children
And being the teen that I was, it's not like I had an otherwise perfect attendance in any of my high school years.
Just turn on your voice recorder and go.
I can't imagine any good reason for that policy other than covering for terrible people.
Is there an expectation of privacy in a public school classroom?
Uhm. Where in the world do you live?! :O
Prison food probably means you have to break the taboo some days no matter what.
4 hours without food seems very short, it only would be a problem if the main food source would be fast carbs which let the blood sugar drop very quickly afterwards.
Freudian slip?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hangry
..and I just learned the word is over a century old, it's definitely not new slang.
Obesity comes from ultimately consuming more calories than calories exerted. Your body learns (maybe this is the wrong word) to store fats when there are long periods of time without eating
I strongly agree with the avoiding carbs and sticking to healthy fats and that it reduces the obesity problem to none.
I definitely agree that obesity comes from consuming more calories that exerting.
I strongly disagree that fat gets stored when you don't eat for a longer time. The exact opposite is the case, nothing can be stored when you don't eat. When you rise blood sugar the body releases insulin which is the fat storage hormone. So the less often you do it the less fat gets stored.
I was a good kid!
If I had of robbed or killed someone and been to Juvenile Hall, my pants would probably have been dry.
The world chews up and spits out good kids. I vowed early on that I wouldn't let anyone shit on me again and it really shaped my early life, not necessarily for the better. I overshot assertive by a decent margin.
Fortunately, I eventually settled into a healthy middle ground. I do wonder if there is a method of preparing "good kids" for the world of shit they are about to encounter in a manner that is a net benefit to them (ie. Not scarred or jaded by it). Not that I'm ever having kids.
The teacher on the other hand might decide it was time for a trip to the principal's office & call home to parents because the student caused a disruption to the class by leaving without permission.
It is indeed exactly as you said. The world chewed me up for being innocent. I was routinely physically assaulted at school. These things were passed off as roughhousing or joking and the adults never intervened, and some even seemed to appreciate the "humor."
The adults rolled their eyes at me essentially for being weak, it was sort of like "sigh, what are we gonna do with that kid?" It occurs to me now that these were bitter, jaded people who hated a child for his naiveté.
If I defended myself, I was the bad guy. At some point I thought: "it doesn't make sense that I am the one who is right and that everyone else is wrong, so maybe I should be more like those guys." But then I got punished too. For example, it was considered funny for people to kick me in the balls at times. It had happened to me 10+ times and nobody got punished. Regrettably, I did it once to another kid and it was a scandal and I got punished.
I am in a healthy place now but I thank God I got through the teen and young adult years without becoming a criminal. I think I easily could have, because I came out of school a deeply damaged individual.
As a contrast, at my school the policy was far more reasonable: you still needed permission to leave, but if you didn't abuse the privilege—using it every day, or disappearing for half the lesson—the teacher wouldn't give you any grief.
A codified system is bound to introduce problems: 'You get one bathroom break during class per week, and you've used yours, but this is an emergency? Sorry, I trust you, but the system says I have to give you detention if you go.'
My point was that the problem was with GP's specific (though perhaps commonplace) school culture/teachers, not the general idea of requiring permission.
1) Adult bladders are larger, we're more experienced in judging the severity of our needs so we're unlikely to hold it to the point of physical injury. In kids, especially when they've been trained to artificially "hold it in" by schools, they become less sensitized to their needs and can develop problems ranging from UTI's to incontinence.
2) Teachers went to the bathroom all of the time when I was in school, they'd pull the school nurse, or a secretary, or teacher's assistant from somewhere to watch the class for a few minutes.
3) Taxi drivers can stop in between trips.
4a) Bus drivers on long-hauls can stop at rest stops, and do so regularly both for themselves & their passengers.
4b) Apart from city buses, many buses (like Greyhounds) have a bathroom on board so a rest stop isn't even required, just a pull off to the side of the road & take their keys with them to the back of the bus
4c) Buses that run frequent stop local routes, There's generally a place to go at each end of the route, but there is actually employer abuse in this area with schedules so tight and penalties for running behind schedule meaning the have a place to go is only one of the concerns. Wearing adult diapers isn't uncommon, and transit unions routinely fight for bathroom rights. But this awful situation for a certain group of workers is not at all a justification for inflicting similar constraints on other people, much less children with developing bodies.
There was one time a kid got denied wrongfully because the teacher thought he was part of a group that was causing trouble right before that. He had a half-empty Gatorade bottle in his backpack from lunch... he was sitting in the back of class and chugged it while the teacher wasn't looking. He then refilled it with a different yellow liquid, if you know what I mean. I'm a bit surprised the teacher didn't catch him and that nobody freaked out and snitched.
This story aired in TV and probably it's no longer the case. Also it likely bends the truth a bit, but nevertheless this is so unsettling and absurd that I wanted to share it.
I substitute taught for a few years after college, and you can't leave the classroom at all except during your prep period. It was really bad some days.
Well it’s not like you have to be there at all, so no ones going to care why you get up and leave.
In the US, most prisons have an open, bare toilet in the cell shared by a few cell mates. Even if one can technically use it whenever, according to what @throwaway998662 says, in practice this means you can only crap during the 1-2 hours a day when your cell mate(s) are gone.
Yeah, you could get a capricious teacher that says "no" when you ask, but that doesn't seem like much in comparison to the degradation and potential for violence of using the toilet in prison...