This essay first appeared in my newsletter. Sign up here if interested in F’ing up the status quo and fixing education.

---

The average American student spends over 13,000 hours in school, waiting for bells to grant permission for movement, and raising their hands to request basic human needs. While schools claim to empower through education, their daily operations mirror another powerful institution: the prison system. 

While their stated purposes couldn’t be more different – one claims to empower through education, the other to punish and reform through confinement – the unsettling similarities in their daily operations reveal a deeper truth about how our society views discipline, control, and the molding of human behavior.

While their stated purposes couldn’t be more different – one claims to empower through education, the other to punish and reform through confinement – the unsettling similarities in their daily operations reveal a deeper truth about how our society views discipline, control, and the molding of human behavior.

Consider the parallels:

• You are told when you can speak
• You are told when you can eat
• Your time outside is limited and scheduled
• Your day is divided into rigid time blocks
• You must ask permission to leave your assigned room
• Authority figures constantly monitor behavior
• You need permission to move through the hallways
• Bells tell you when you can and cannot move
• Breaking rules results in isolation from others
• Personal expression is limited and controlled
• Your daily schedule is decided for you
• Good behavior can earn you special privileges
• Bad behavior can result in loss of privileges
• You are told this is “for your own good”

Is it any wonder that students disengage and rebel? 

We’ve built institutions that prioritize compliance over curiosity, control over creativity, and uniformity over unique potential. 

As a result, we shouldn’t be shocked when they respond like prisoners: mentally checking out, watching the clock, counting the days until release. 

The tragedy isn’t just that we’ve normalized this system of control; it’s that we’ve wasted generations of human potential in the process (while diverting attention to distractions and other “empty calorie” areas).
It is time for us to fundamentally reimagine education so it is not a sentence that our children must serve.

---

If you read this far, some related essays you’ll also like:

1. The Great Disengagement: America’s students have checked out
2. Beyond grades: Why measuring learning kills it
3. Degrees of deception: How America’s universities became debt factories
4. Bread, circuses and education
5. The School of Entrepreneuring
6. From myth to measurement: Rethinking US News & World Report College Rankings
7. The perverse incentives driving America’s government schools
8. The endless ladder
9. Students are solving the wrong problems
10. Your kids grades are bullshit
11. Ghost nonprofits and the manufacturing of virtue