This is what education in Maryland, in the American Empire, looks like:
- You have to send your children to public school, because in addition to schooling being mandatory, both parents have to work because the average job that the average person in Maryland can get doesn’t pay enough to provide for a spouse to stay home, or to pay for private school
- When they get to school, they have to undergo searches to cross a security perimeter; they can’t even bring weapons up to the perimeter and store them
- Their communication devices are locked up
- In class, they only get to talk or get up when authorized
- For sure, they have no freedom of speech, no ability to talk back, etc.
- They are forced to follow a fixed schedule and generally to obey orders
- If they don’t obey orders, they get to go to solitary (in school suspension), or they get “expelled” and go to a holding pen, with worse conditions
We should also remember that in many of the settings that we normally call “prison”, inmates are allowed to:
- Get their education
- Work for some small amount of money
- Watch TV, work out, etc.
- Head out to the yard for an hour a day
so whether public school is fundamentally different from a minimum-security prison, is itself a questionable proposition. Directly: if the students are learning at a slow pace, that leaves them unable to participate in economic activity other than manual labor, then what’s the point? And if there is no point, then how is it different than part-time prison and juvie?