Doing K through 12

[Os Cangaceiros]

Violent homicides in school are vanishingly rare. Study after study shows that kids are less likely to be harmed in school than at home, that school violence has been decreasing since the early 90s, and that the decrease isn't causally related to the ramp-up in security. And yet the locking down of schools goes on. If you didn't know better, you might think we're trying to torture our children.

Indeed, Fuentes provides a some evidence that schooling has always been about torture. In her first chapter, "A Brief History of School Violence," she notes that "as long as there have been public schools . . . there has been chaos and control, crime and punishment in the classroom. . . . The rhythm of switch and ferule—even the cat-o'-nine-tails—provided the meter by which the early schoolmaster or –mistress imparted the three Rs and obedience to misbehaving youngsters."

http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/noah-berlatsky-lockdown-high-annette-fuentes/Content?oid=4372069

[Sensible Socialist]

The current system of public schooling, with or without prison-like features, is a disheartening experience that I don't wish upon any child. Millions of kids are convinced that learning is something to be avoided like the plague. I can't imagine what barbed wire, metal detectors, and SWAT teams roaming the halls could do the emotional stability, or lack thereof, of a child who only knows violence and despair.

Edited post to discern current public schooling from public schooling in general.

[jake williams]

Public schooling, with or without prison-like features, is a disheartening experience that I don't wish upon any child.
Public schooling is an indispensible public service absolutely essential to the development (personal and collective) of the working class. The struggle for its democratic character and contact is a central feature of class struggle. That it continues to have many destructive and damaging features represents our own collective failure to win that particular struggle, replacing a capitalist educational system with a socialist one while replacing capitalist society with socialist society.

I don't mean to dismiss the psychological and often even physical violence historically and presently exacted against students of public schools. But we need to have schools, we're going to have schools, and since they're going to exist we need to fight them. When we think that "free", "charter" or "un" schools are the solution, we fail to actually take seriously the fight for a democratic, public education system that serves the interests of all working class students. We fall into a trap set openly and explicitly by the bourgeoisie in their efforts to destroy public schools and their union teachers. We fail to actually fight for the interests of students, who are going to have to go to school - if we won't fight for public schools, then they'll go private schools, where the working class won't even potentially exert any control to mediate and then abolish those features the capitalist state ("public" or "private") exacts which are repressive of students.

(I guess there's a third option: we could be Bangladesh, we could let our kids decide whether or not they want to go to private schools when they're done their day of unskilled sweatshop work, if they can pay for their pencils and books themselves, which they won't, because they won't get any money and they won't get time off. Seriously, there's going to be schools, whether you like it or not, and there's going to be work, whether you like it or not.)

[Sensible Socialist]

You're absolutely right. My post referred to current public schooling in the U.S. I've edited my original post to reflect that.

[Os Cangaceiros]

There will always be places of learning, what we call "schools". I would hope that they'd look a good deal different than they do today though!

I'm more interested in the subject of "school" as it exists today, as an institution that can be examined in concrete ways. Specifically some of Foucault's ideas (I'm not a big Foucault fan, but I find some of his formulations interesting...Negri also talks about it in "Empire") about school as a critical node of discipline within society, where often people receive their first tutorial in submission and subjugation. In this way school isn't terribly different from the factory or the prison or the military camp.