schools as 'total institutions'

The philosopher and critic Ivan Illich was interested in key features of modern life:
Jay Doubleyou: ivan illich on education and health

Especially the feature of the 'institution':
Ivan Illich - Deschooling Society - Institutional Spectrum

Here's a course on 'critical pedagogy':

The origins of critical pedagogy are outside the classroom, indeed, outside the common imagination of a school. Many critical pedagogues today continue to see the school itself, and not just the classroom, as an institution to be challenged, subverted, undermined, or ultimately, completely dismantled. Schools as a model for organizing learning are fundamentally oppressive: they force learning into a narrow schedule and space and simultaneously reinforce the notion that learning does not happen in important ways anywhere else.

Ivan Illich writes that "a … major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching. Teaching, it is true, may contribute to certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. But most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives."

As a place of confinement, both physically and psychologically, schools become a place where students learn to look to authority figures and experts for answers and come to recognize only a certain set of knowledges as legitimate.

Learning Our Way Away From Institutions — Hybrid Pedagogy

And here's some recent comment from an education blog:

Ivan Illich published Deschooling Society in 1970. The concept of deschooling has moved on from Illich’s initial definition. However, many of the ideas in his book are worth revisiting.

No amount of reformation, according to Illich — adjustments to the ways schools are constructed and run, changes in teachers’ attitudes to students, the use of technology in the classroom, and even a change in how students are engaged — will alter the outcomes of schooling. Schools can only school. And they can only school, and not educate, because they are total institutions that are designed to control every participant and process within them towards a stated end: egalitarianism and unquestioning submission to the state or some other dominating institution, i.e. an organized religion. This is not an education, it is indoctrination. It breeds narrow-mindedness, and an incapacity to think independently. Schools are not to be reformed, they are to be abandoned altogether, and the vast resources that are taken from families and businesses (through taxation) to fund the schooling industry should remain with the families and the businesses to fund home-based education and more financially viable private enterprise.

(PDF) Ivan Illich: Yet Again Revisited | Lance A Box - Academia.edu

Certainly today's universities can be considered to be 'total institutions':

Billion dollar institutions now police students' Halloween costumes, their private text messages, their social media posts, and even their external voluntary associations. Faculty and staff, too, are finding their words—written, spoken, and even sung—subject to formal, and more often secret, investigation. Almost every aspect of life on many campuses is now subject to unprecedented surveillance and potential sanction.

Total institution - Wikipedia
The University as a Total Institution - Quillette

As could primary schools:
ERIC - ED109817 - The Elementary School as a Total Institution., 1975-Apr

So, what is the 'total institution'?

A total institution is a closed social system in which life is organized by strict norms, rules, and schedules, and what happens within it is determined by a single authority whose will is carried out by staff who enforce the rules. Total institutions are separated from wider society by distance, laws, and/or protections around their property and those who live within them are generally similar to each other in some way. In general, they are designed to provide care to a population that is unable to care for themselves, and/or protect society from the potential harm that this population could do to its members. The most typical examples include prisons, military compounds, private boarding schools, and locked mental health facilities.

What Is a Total Institution?
Total Institution | Encyclopedia.com

And how can a school be described as a 'total institution'?

The following thinks this is a good idea:

First: teachers supervise all aspects of daily life; going to school means being separated from family and becoming a part of a new environment. Students are no longer under the supervision of a parent, rather under that of a teacher whose rules differed from those at home.

Second: the school is a rigid system which provides students with a standardized and organized way of life; At home, schedules are not as stringent or fixed as it is at school where events are scheduled for certain times.

Third: formal rules and daily schedules dictate when, where, and how students perform virtually every part of their daily routines; as previously mentioned, the rules in the classroom differ from those at home. Rules at school are in place to control what students do, how they do it and when they did it, as well as, with whom; whereas at home, routines are a little less structured.

Finally: a single rational plan exists to fulfill the particular goal of the institution.

‘De-socialization’ is the idea that individuals can ‘un-learn’ ideas and values, which most often takes place within the educational environment. This occurs when children, who share different traditions, beliefs and cultures, begin to unlearn what they have learned in the home. Students are eventually able to recognize “bad” values, such as racism and sexism, and unlearn them. School helps students do this by exposing them to these topics and issues and re-teaching them.

We see this process in our schools but what happens to students who immigrate and have not been exposed to western culture? Would this work when students have reached an older age or would the process of de-socialization and re-socialization still apply?

Schools as Total Institutions - Teaching Rocks!

On the other hand, if 'socialisation' is what schools are all about, the educationalist John Taylor Gatto had something to say about what this particular institution is responsible for:

Gatto asserts the following regarding what school does to children in 'Dumbing Us Down':

> It confuses the students. It presents an incoherent ensemble of information that the child needs to memorize to stay in school. Apart from the tests and trials, this programming is similar to the television; it fills almost all the "free" time of children. One sees and hears something, only to forget it again.
> It teaches them to accept their class affiliation.
> It makes them indifferent.
> It makes them emotionally dependent.
> It makes them intellectually dependent.
> It teaches them a kind of self-confidence that requires constant confirmation by experts (provisional self-esteem).
> It makes it clear to them that they cannot hide, because they are always supervised.[12]

Jay Doubleyou: dumbing us down
Jay Doubleyou: john taylor gatto: on video

To finish with another philosopher:

While power is often thought of as something someone important (like a king) “holds”, Foucault saw it very differently. He revealed power to be highly distributed, diffuse and relational. In the modern world, the pressure we feel to behave in certain ways is often disconnected from any particular person or organization. Instead it’s embedded in social norms, social structures, institutionalized rules, networks and even physical spaces.

In his book Discipline and Punish, Foucault famously refers to utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham’s invention the “panopticon” as a metaphor for decentralized power through surveillance and self-surveillance.

The panopticon is a prison design in which individual cells surround a tower at the centre from which a guard could, at any point in time, be looking. The prisoners never know when the guard is looking (like with a one-way mirror), but because it’s always possible, they behave as if watched, thus, disciplining themselves.

Bentham saw his invention as stupendously excellent design for its economical efficiency, and he imagined it should be applied to schools, hospitals and other institutions as well. For Foucault, this panopticon is a metaphor demonstrating how power, at one time associated with a sovereign, became embedded into the very institutions, and architectures of the spaces we live in.

Foucault, panopticism and digital power – The Dead Philosophers' Guide to New Technology

See:
Jay Doubleyou: foucault's discipline and punish made easier
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