School is prison with brighter colors? pic.twitter.com/pMAEeOCfHI
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 20, 2026
Kids used to tell me how schools were like prisons, and I'd agree just to be in empathy with them but wasn't truly convinced since places and time spent is what you make it, what you do there to get yourself out or to move to the next level. But this may be the most visually convincing argument that "schools are like prisons" and how irrefutably true the point is in spite of the most well-meaning, suicidally empathetic adults you have occupying the classroom. Kids will leave school with much of the campus mapped in their heads, a memory of their favorite or most-liked teacher along with some of the most forgettable people in their lives. And then this threat of prison, of returning to it, of making it some defaulted comfort from childhood remains as a sword of Damocles over one's head. And I don't care if the school is some fancy Catholic school like Mater Dei or fancy prep school like Evans. Yes, kids will return to somewhere. Make that somewhere home, their mother's abode. Heartbreaking. And then think of the ghouls that occupy the classrooms or administrative offices or off-campus offices for when they're called upon to do some hideous, clandestine action against a teacher to isolate him, destroy his character, identity, and reputation.
Even if schools are not actual prisons or physical copies for the real thing, it's a psychological prison, which is even worse. From John Holt,
In a great many other ways, he learns that he is worthless, untrustworthy, fit only to take other people's orders, a blank sheet for other people to write on. Oh, we make a lot of nice noises in school about respect for the child and individual differences, and the like. But our acts, as opposed to our talk, says to the child, "Your experience, your concerns, your curiosities, your needs, what you know, what you want, what you wonder about, what you hope for, what you fear, what you like and dislike, what you are good at or not so good at - all this is of not the slightest importance, it counts for nothing. What counts here, and the only thing that counts, is what we know, what we think is important, what we want you to do, think and be." The child soon learns not to ask questions - the teacher isn't there to satisfy his curiosity. Having learned to hide his curiosity, he later learns to be ashamed of it. Given no chance to find out who he is - and to develop that person, whoever it is - he soon comes to accept the adults' evaluation of him.
