Prisons and Schools, Slavery and Education

“There is no subjugation so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom, for in that way one
captures volition itself.”
- Rousseau, Emile

“The same people that control the school system control the prison system, and the whole social system,
ever since slavery…”
- Dead Prez, “They Schools”

C.J. Sentell
May 2008

I take as my starting point in this essay the recognition that the institution of slavery, in
different and various guises, lives on today. For some, this may be a surprising and
contentious claim – after all, slavery in the United States was abolished in 1865 by the
Thirteenth Amendment, which declared that “[n]either slavery nor involuntary servitude,
except as a punishment for crime where of the party has been duly convicted, shall exist
within the United States, or any area under its jurisdiction.” Such a view, however, stems
from a lack of historical sense that is both the product and the cause of an ideology of
freedom and choice that has come to permeate almost every corner of life in late American
empire.
But when one considers, taking a longer view for a moment, the ways in which
slavery has operated as a constituent institution of human culture since its inception, its
sudden and categorical disappearance in the sixth decade of the nineteenth century suddenly
becomes problematic or even laughable. Indeed, Orlando Patterson has shown that “there is
nothing notably peculiar about the institution of slavery. It has existed from before the dawn
of human history right down to the twentieth century, in the most primitive of human
societies and in the most civilized.”1 And by tracing the intimate connections between the
institution of slavery and the founding practices of human civilization – e.g., to the rise of
trade and commerce, to the codification of law and religion, and to the very construction of
human identity and agency itself – Patterson draws our attention to what Freud has called das
Ungehaben in der Kulture, or the uneasiness of culture. Marked by violence physical and
symbolic, by natal alienation that sunders individuals from their historical and psychical
genealogies, and by a generalized social dishonor and degradation, Patterson shows the way

1
Orlando Paterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study , (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1982): vii.

1
in which slavery just is this uneasiness and how this uneasiness has structured human culture
from its inception to its present.2 In this way, the “social death” of the slave forms a
determinate negation of the social life available to “free” persons in a given culture; the
possibility of freedom, in other words, has been and continues to be defined with respect to
its constituent opposite, namely, slavery. Thus, when slavery is taken as a constitutive
feature of human culture, the narrative that maintains slavery’s sudden exit stage left, so to
speak, – due to the triumph of enlightenment ideals such as liberty, fraternity, and equality –
begins to loose coherence and opens up a space for rethinking the nature of slavery, and how
various forms and vestiges of it live on in contemporary life.
Such projects are well under way. Many scholars, activists, and intellectuals, for
example, have shown the material, legal, and ideological continuities between the historical
institution of slavery and the burgeoning prison-industrial complex.3 As the fastest growing
industrial sector in the United States, prisons are a unique site to examine the historical
continuities between present-day political institutions and the institution of American slavery.
Notable among these continuities is the legal construction of criminality as it developed in
late nineteenth century slave codes and the mutually reinforcing institutional channels
between incarceration, state executions, corporate class warfare, and racialized poverty that
exist today.4 These continuities, however, are only part of the explanation as to why the
United States contains but 5 percent of the world’s population and yet a full 25 percent of its
prisoners, which are overwhelmingly people of color.5 As Wacquant notes, “the astounding
upsurge in black incarceration in the past three decades results from the obsolescence of the
ghetto as a device for caste control and the correlative need for a substitute apparatus for
keeping (unskilled) African Americans in a subordinate and confined position – physically,

2
Ibid., see his Introduction and Chapters 1-3.
3
Cf., Colin Joan Dayan, “Legal Slaves and Civil Bodies.” Neplanta: Views from South 2.1 (2001): 3-39;
Kim Gilmore, “Slavery and Prison – Understanding the Connections.” Social Justice 27.3 (2000): 195-
205; Loïc Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration,” New Left Review 13.1 (2002); David Cole, No
Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System, (New York: New Press, 2002);
Angela Davis, The Prison Industrial Complex, (Oakland: AK Press, 2000).
4
For the latter, see above note. For the former, cf. Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman, “Fugitive Justice:
The Appeal of the Slave.” Representations 92 (2005): 1-15; and Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection:
Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, (New York: Oxford University Press,
1997), esp. Chapters 1 and 3.
5
Pepi Leistyna, “Facing Oppression: Youth Voices from the Front,” in Education as Enforcement: The
Militarization and Corporatization of Schools. Edited by Kenneth Saltman & David Gabbard. (New York:
RoutledgeFalmer, 2003): 105.

2
socially, and symbolically.”6 Such substitute apparatus no doubt includes prisons, but it also
includes a whole host of other social institutions such as the military, medical and
agricultural corporations, and even such seemingly beneficent institutions as the schools.
Thus, while the prison-industrial complex may be one of the institutions in which the
legacies of slavery persist most prominently, it is by no means singular. Taking for granted,
as I must for the sake of space and argument, the clear and tight historical continuity between
the institution of slavery and the rise of global capitalism, we can also note that within the
last half-century there has been an enormous expansion of other industrial sectors, such as the
military-industrial complex, the agricultural-industrial complex, and, more recently, the
educational-industrial complex. By linking each of these to the military-industrial complex –
the first such complex to gain vernacular currency, aided in no small measure by
Eisenhower’s ominous warning of its rising influence in the last days of his presidency –
critics of contemporary culture work to highlight the ways in which each of these industrial
networks profit from perpetuating social inequality through structural racism and poverty,
destroying the environment through the reckless exploitation and consumption of natural
resources, and legitimating the large-scale killing of other human beings in the name of
“freedom”. Once the structural similarities of these networks of late capitalism are drawn
out, juxtaposed, and analyzed, new points of contact begin to emerge for the project of
thinking through contemporary slavery.
One such point of contact is the public school system in the United States, which,
especially over the last two decades, has increasingly come to resemble the prison system.
To mention but a few of the obvious and superficial features of this resemblance, consider the
sharp increase of metal detectors and armed guards (sometimes outnumbering teachers, e.g.,
in post-Katrina New Orleans7), random and periodic searches for drugs and weapons, the
rapid increase of JROTC and other military programs such as “Soldiers to Schools,” and the
increasing levels of physical and psychological surveillance, especially in schools with high
populations of African Americans and other youths of color.8 And while this comparison is

6
Loïc Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: Rethinking Race and Imprisonment in Twenty-first-century
America, Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum 27, no. 2 (April-May, 2002): 23.
7
Naomi Klein, “Disaster Capitalism: The new economy of catastrophe,” Harper’s Magazine (October
2007): 49.
8
Enora R. Brown, “Freedom for Some, Discipline for ‘Others’,” in Education as Enforcement: The
Militarization and Corporatization of Schools. Edited by Kenneth Saltman & David Gabbard. (New York:
RoutledgeFalmer, 2003):127.

3
not intended to detract from the gravity of contemporary prison life, Pepi Leistyna says that it
is meant to point out “how institutions of public education in the United States are, in part,
complicit in this corporate and hegemonic process – that there is an inextricable link between
the astronomical numbers of racially subordinated and working-poor in prisons today and our
system of schooling.”9 Moreover, as Ken Saltman observes, many of the urban,
predominantly nonwhite institutions we commonly refer to as “schools” are actually used to
“contain students who have been deemed hopeless and have been consigned to institutional
containment,” which in turn functions “as the first level of containment while the second
level, America’s largest growing industry, the prison system, awaits them.”10 But as Saltman
goes on to note, it is not enough “to identify the extent to which certain schools (particularly
urban nonwhite schools) increasingly resemble the military or prisons, nor is it adequate to
point out the ways public schools are used to recruit soldiers,” or, I would add, reproduce
structures that aid in the production of criminals. Rather, public schooling “needs to be
understood in relation to the enforcement of globalization through the implementation of all
the policies and reforms that are guided toward the neoliberal ideal.”11 The point, then, is to
draw attention to the ways in which the schools function to reproduce certain structural
inequities, especially as they correspond to the changing demands for labor within global
capitalist markets.
Over the course of the last decade or so, the public schools have come under
increasing political and economic pressure to perform according to standardized measures.
These measures, currently imposed most onerously by the federal No Child Left Behind Act,
fail to take into account both the socio-economic contexts in which schools are situated and
the interested educational needs of huge swaths of America’s school-age population. Such
standardization is aimed at producing a generalized citizen who has mastered “what everyone
needs to know” so that they can fit seamlessly into the prevailing markets of labor and social
capital. In this way, and contrary to the tradition that links public education with the
production of good democratic citizens, education is not about “infusing civic responsibility
in preparation for public life; rather, it is about ensuring the dissemination of a particular

9
Pepi Leistyna, “Facing Oppression: Youth Voices from the Front,” in Education as Enforcement,105.
10
Kenneth Saltman, Collateral Damage: Corporatizing Public Schools – A Threat to Democracy ,
(Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000): 86.
11
Kenneth Saltman, “Introduction” to Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization
of Schools. Edited by Kenneth Saltman & David Gabbard. (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003): 8.

4
market logic within which labor stratification is embraced and confirmed.”12 Whether it is
through vouchers, charter schools, or federal legislation, the schools are quickly becoming
key sites for the “free market” and its specious – and in this case racist – ideology of choice
to privatize what was once considered the ultimate public good.
By systematically channeling certain groups of individuals into certain social roles by
allocating cultural capital to particular individuals at the precise moment they emerge into
citizenship, schools are a (dare I say the) central means by which social stratification is
reproduced in contemporary American culture. “Indeed,” Pierre Bourdieu note, “among all
the solutions put forward throughout history to the problem of the transmission of power and
privileges, there surely does not exist one that is better concealed, and therefore better
adapted to societies which tend to refuse the most patent forms of hereditary transmission of
power and privileges, than the solution which the educational system provides by
contributing to the reproduction of the structure of class relations and by concealing, by an
apparently neutral attitude, the fact that it fulfills this function.”13 That is, the actual
consequences of schooling are masked precisely through the justificatory rhetoric that
couches the schools’ activity as the objective transmission of knowledge through an equitable
system of distribution. In numerous works, for example, Jonathan Kozol has documented
just how schools in the United States are inexorably bound up with the continuing – and
widening – structural inequity in education for wealthy, white youths, on the one hand, and
working-class and poor youths on the other.14 “These schools,” Enora Brown argues, “are
structurally embedded in, and historically constituted through, dynamic postindustrial, global
economic, and political relationships.”15 So constituted, then, today’s public schools are also
necessarily connected to the histories and political economies – including, and perhaps
especially slavery – that have made contemporary conditions possible.
By inquiring into such conditions we can begin to show how modern-day American
schools, too, have inherited certain vestiges of slavery and its aftermath, and how the schools
need to analyzed to account for the ways in which they continue to function as a primary site
of the reproduction of social inequality that is in a direct lineage with the history of American

12
Pepi Leistyna, “Facing Oppression: Youth Voices from the Front,” in Education as Enforcement,106.
13
Pierre Bourdieu, “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction,” in Power and Ideology in Education ,
Edited by Jerome Karabel and A.H. Halsey, (New York: Oxford University Press): 487-88.
14
Cf. Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools , (New York: Crown Publishers,
1991).
15
Enora R. Brown, “Freedom for Some, Discipline for ‘Others’,” in Education as Enforcement, 128.

5
slavery. As Angela Davis says, the “challenge of the twenty-first century is not to demand
equal opportunity to participate in the machinery of oppression. Rather, it is to identify and
dismantle those structures in which racism continues to be embedded.”16 The schools are one
arm of this “machinery of oppression,” and in this essay I would like to inquire into the
extent to which the schools, as an institution, and education, as the more general process of
habituation and social reproduction, work to maintain the structures of oppression and racism
that are a direct consequence of slavery in the U.S., and that could very well constitute a form
of slavery that remains with us today.
Thus, in the first part of this essay I provide a very brief historical analysis of public
schooling in the United States that aims to highlight two issues: 1) an ideology that closely
associates the function of the school with the production of citizens who have the appropriate
capacities for democratic life, and a direct historical connection between the establishment of
public schools, especially in the South, with putative abolition of slavery. Through this
historical analysis, I suggest that such an understanding allows us to better see the formation
conditions of today’s public schools that, in turn, works to complicate the easy rhetorical
association that schools automatically and inevitably contribute to democratic life. In fact,
what I want to gesture to is rather the opposite, namely, the way in which the justificatory
rhetoric of democratic education actually works to mask the production of a different type of
citizen altogether. Thus, in the second section of this essay, I want to provide a sociological
analysis that aims to highlight the mechanisms of social reproduction that form the basis of
contemporary schooling. Central to such an analysis is the notion of habituation and social
ordering, which leads me to an analysis of freedom as it relates to education more generally.
* * *
The history of American public education is inextricably bound up with the history of
American slavery. This may seem striking, especially in light of the long tradition of
philosophical and political discourse in the United States that links democracy and education
in close correlation. But it is precisely at this juncture between democracy and education that
slavery enters to complicate the easy relationship between these two American ideals.
Addressing the Virginia legislature in 1787, for example, Thomas Jefferson argued
that any people who simultaneously expected to remain ignorant and free expected the
impossible, and proposed one of the first state-wide systems of public education in this

16
Angela Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture , (New York: Seven Stories
Press, 2005): 29.

6
country that would provide three years of schooling for every white child in the state. But, as
James Anderson points out, Jefferson’s proposal for establishing schools, meant to ensure
Virginia’s peace, prosperity, and democratic future, “depended as much, if not more, on the
containment and repression of literate culture among its enslaved population as it did on the
diffusion of literate culture among its free population.”17 This tension between the perceived
necessity of public education for building a democratic culture and the perceived dangers
involved with educating slaves only grew over the course of the next century.
Between 1800 and 1830, most Southern states passed laws making it a crime to teach
slaves to read or write.18 While this criminalization of the education of slaves was in direct
conflict with the ideology of inferiority that legitimated slavery by claiming that slaves were
sub-human and incapable of achieving any “higher” culture, it nevertheless articulated an
authentic awareness of the connections between education, power, and the acquisition of
social capital. Just a generation later, however, between 1830 and 1860, there began a
widespread movement for the popular education of free citizens that laid the groundwork for
the systems of state education that would come to exist a few decades later.19 These stirrings
would eventually become the basis of the movement for progressive education, the strength
of which varied drastically between regions of the country, with the North and the Midwest
taking the lead, and the South lagging far behind. Central to their argument for a system of
“universal education” was a democratic ideology wherein local schools were to stand as a
“bulwark of the Republic and a repository of popular hopes and aspirations.”20 Contained
within this idealism, though, was a certain belief about the perfectibility of human life and its
institutions, and that through education the public and its problems could be progressively
ameliorated.
This early form of progressivism, especially that of Horace Mann, combined
Jeffersonian republicanism, Christian moralism, and Emersonian idealism to produce an
ideology that connected freedom, self-government, and universal education.21 Mann’s
vision, moreover, located the authority to determine the ends of the schools in the people, not
in the professional schoolmen, which, according to Lewis Cremin, was one of the decisive

17
James Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860- 1935, (Chapel Hill: The University of
North Carolina Press, 1988): 1.
18
Ibid., 2.
19
Ibid.
20
Lawrence Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 ,
New York: Vintage Press, 1961): 8.
21
Ibid., 9.

7
forces in this history of American education.22 According to Cremin, “Mann was one of the
first after Rousseau to argue that education in groups is not merely a practical necessity, but a
social desideratum…He insisted that the discipline of a free school must be the self-discipline
of the individual.”23 Built into the American school from its beginning, then, is an ideology
that connects self-government to a specific form agency that makes possible the “voluntary”
compliance with the laws of reason and duty, and that this form of self-control is the end
toward which the schools should aim. But with the advent of the Civil War many of these
popular efforts subsided, only to be taken up with a new vigor and purpose, and for a new
population, at the close of the war.
Upon “emancipation” in 1863, then, when former slaves became – if but for a brief
interval – free citizens, they did so at the precise moment that the system of public education
was beginning to take shape more generally.24 This was to have a dramatic impact on the
development of the public school system, especially in the South, for as W.E. B. Du Bois
points out in Black Reconstruction in America, 1860 – 1880, “the first great mass movement
for public education at the expense of the state, in the South, came from Negroes.”25 With
the advent of their freedom, and the concurrent disestablishment of laws criminalizing their
education, former slaves en masse began seeking different types of education: some sought
primary education for their children, others technical skills suitable for employment in
industry, still others basic literacy, while others pursued opportunities in the newly forming
universities.
Organized by Northern philanthropists, by the Union army itself, and – perhaps most
importantly – by schools already in existence but had been forced to operate in secrecy until
then, thousands of former slaves began educational programs of various kinds. One of the
most notable of these underground schools was opened in Florida in 1818 by a colored
Frenchman named Julien Froumontaine from Santo Domingo, but was closed a decade later
when it became a crime to educate any person of color. The school, however, continued to
operate clandestinely for many years afterward, “and in a sense,” Du Bois says, “laid the
foundation of the new state system of public instruction, which gave equal school privileges

22
Ibid., 10.
23
Ibid., 11.
24
James Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935, 2.
25
W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935) (New York: The Free Press,
1988): 638.

8
to all children regardless of race or color.”26 But neither were children the only ones
pursuing new educational opportunities, nor the school its only vehicle. In day schools and
Sunday-schools all over the South, newly emancipated citizens took to teaching each other
the skills of reading and writing, with many adults claiming only to want to learn to read the
Bible before they died.27 And so while the demand for education on the part of newly freed
slaves was a general one, the conditions under which it was possible to flourish varied from
state to state, and the specific ends and means by which it was attained varied as greatly as
the individuals who sought it.
But in terms of the public school system that was established during this time, Du
Bois notes that, in most Southern states, it began with the enfranchisement of the former
slaves.28 Upon receiving the franchise with the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in
1870, freed blacks began assuming roles of power across the South – especially in the “Black
Belt” states of South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi – and began exercising that power
by codifying the public obligation for schooling in the Reconstruction constitutions by means
of taxation. This principle of direct taxation, which had been theretofore largely unknown in
the school laws of South, was, according to Du Bois, “undoubtedly the most important
contribution of the Reconstruction regime to the public school movement in the South.”29 In
addition to taxation, the Freedmen’s Bureau, at first having no mandate or provisions for
education, soon acquired one and began organizing schools more formally. Du Bois reports
that the “annual amount which the Bureau voted to school purposes increased from $27,000
in 1865 to nearly $1,000,000 in 1870, and reached a total in 1865-1870 of $5,262,511.26. In
July, 1870, there were 4,239 schools under their supervision, with 9,307 teachers and
247,333 pupils. Notwithstanding this, [however,] of the 1,700,000 Negro children of school
age in 1870, only about one-tenth were actually in school.”30
With the rise of publicly funded schools, a new question brought a considerable
amount of discussion, namely, that of compulsory attendance. Within this discussion, the
justificatory rhetoric linking self-government and education again came to the fore. Du Bois
recounts one such debate in South Carolina, where a certain Congressman Ransier supported
compulsory attendance in the schools because “ignorance was a cause of vice and

26
Ibid., 644.
27
Ibid., 642.
28
Ibid., 648-49.
29
Ibid., 663-4.
30
Ibid., 648.

9
degradation, and that civilization and enlightenment were the consequence of the
schoolmaster, and [thus] if force was necessary to secure the benefits of education, it ought to
be resorted to.”31 This matter, however, was tabled, as a consensus emerged that such force
was futile until a more systematic and consistent network of schools was established.
While this Southern shift in the movement to establish a state-run educational system
could not have gone forward without the federal assistance of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and
the protection afforded by means of a military presence throughout the region, it also could
not have accomplished as much as it did without the help of a large number of dedicated
Northerners who migrated South to teach in the schools and, more importantly, to aid in the
training of teachers who would fulfill this new demand for education. What, Du Bois asks,
“[i]f a poor, degraded, disadvantaged horde achieves sudden freedom and power, what could
we ask of them in ten years?” One such thing is “to strive for increase of knowledge, so as to
teach themselves wisdom and the rhythm of united effort,” the accomplishment of which, for
Du Bois, “crowns the work of Reconstruction.” “The advance of the Negro in education,
helped by the Abolitionists,” he continues, “was phenomenal; but the greatest step was
preparing his own teachers – the gift of New England to the black South.”32
James Anderson follows up on this “gift” in his The Education of Blacks in the South,
1860 – 1935 by recounting its many different manifestations and consequences. Whether it
was in common schools for children, normal schools for teachers, technical schools for labor,
or the newly forming institutions for higher education, these new educational institutions for
ex-slaves were indelibly marked by the political and ideological conflicts that characterized
the post-War period. The sudden upsurge of education among former slaves, for example,
caused a backlash from their former masters. To this end, the American Freedmen’s
Commission reported that the “attempts at education [by former slaves] provoked the most
intense and bitter hostilities, as evincing a desire to render themselves equal to the whites.
Their churches and schoolhouses in many places were destroyed by mobs.”33 Thus, it is
important to note the way in which, at the very moment when schools were being established
by and for former slaves, new sources of racist hostility were coming to the fore. By virtue
of the rapid institutionalization that was occurring around the schools, these racial hostilities
were allowed to crystallize and, one can only suspect, linger within them in various ways.

31
Ibid., 649.
32
Ibid., 637.
33
Ibid., 645-46.

10
Such conflicts, however, were not limited to those between former slaves and their masters,
but also occurred between Northern abolitionists and newly freed slaves – e.g., the intense
struggle between Samuel Armstrong and Booker T. Washington34 – and between black
leaders themselves – e.g., the debates between Washington, Du Boise, and Anna Julia
Cooper, among others – as to the most desirable ends and means of educating the formerly
enslaved populace.
With the end of Reconstruction, however, these newly “emancipated” citizens were
forced back into a sub-citizen class status. With the rise of Jim Crow, which effectively
denied them the franchise, the right to control their labor power, and effectively excluded
them from citizenship that lasted all the way to the 1960’s, many black schools went
underground, returning to a clandestine education that existed before the War, or simply
disbanded altogether.
But amidst these changes, white America continued its march toward “universal”
education. One leader of this march was William T. Harris, whose work was central in
establishing the schools as a social institution of national stature. A New Englander gone
West, Harris was a Hegel scholar, founder of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, the
superintendent of the St. Louis schools (1868-80), and eventually U.S. Commissioner of
Education (1889-1906). In his various capacities, Harris – perhaps more than any other
educator of his day – successfully worked to professionalize the administration of the
schools.35 According to Cremin, Harris was “the great consolidator of pre-Civil War
victories [for universal education], the man who ultimately rationalized the institution of the
public school,” which, when he began working, was a “radical notion shared by a shaky
alliance of farmers, workers, and businessmen; [but] when he concluded it, universal
education had been made the nub of an essentially conservative ideology.”36 “An ignorant
people can be governed,” Harris declared, “but only a wise people can govern itself.”37 To
accomplish this, the school must become the “great instrumentality to lift all classes of
people into a participation in civilized life,” which was a life of order, self-discipline, civic
loyalty, and respect for private property.38

34
Cf. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, Chapter Two.
35
Lawrence Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 ,
New York: Vintage Press, 1961): 15.
36
Ibid.
37
Ibid., 16.
38
Ibid., 17.

11
 It cannot be overemphasized, however, that the rhetoric by which the public school
system was justified during this time was inextricably linked to the industrialism that was
then sweeping the country. As Cremin explains, “Harris’s social philosophy [ultimately]
became an apology for the new urban industrial order, while his pedagogy rendered service
to its educational needs….[The] emphasis is on order rather than freedom, on work rather
than play, on effort rather than interest, on prescription rather than election, on the regularity,
silence, and industry that ‘preserve and save our civil order.’”39 To meet the needs of this
new industrial order, large-scale public investment in manual and technical schools was
initiated.
Across the country, then, industrialization created the political and economic
necessity for universal public education. Within this perceived necessity, moreover, we can
begin to see the way in which the public education system was simultaneously founded as a
means for the achievement of a more democratic polity and as a means of economic
oppression to maintain rigid class stratification.40 In this way, Ivan Illich argues, from the
time of their formation “the schools have been protagonists of social control on the one hand
and free cooperation on the other, both placed at the service of the ‘good society,’ conceived
of as a highly organized and smoothly working corporate structure. Under the impact of
intense urbanization, children become the natural resource to be molded by the schools and
fed into the industrial machine. Progressive politics and the cult of efficiency converged in
the growth of the U.S. public school.”41 Thus, it is precisely here – between the political
idealism that served to justify it and the economic realism that provided the material impetus
for its formation – that the origins of the modern American public school are to be found.
This picture, however, of a professionalized bureaucracy committed to contradictory
ends (i.e., educating a democratic citizenry and producing laborers for capital) is entirely
incomplete without the historical considerations of the rise of a real demand for education on
the part of newly freed slaves. Schools started by and for these new citizens, arising as they
did in the midst of a burgeoning industrial order, were institutions intended to breath new
social life into a people whose former existence had been marked by social death. But at the
exact moment of their founding – and by accomplishing something that was formerly denied
to exist, namely educability – others were at work to employ the schools to ulterior ends,

39
Ibid., 19-20.
40
Enora R. Brown, “Freedom for Some, Discipline for ‘Others’,” in Education as Enforcement, 136.
41
Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, (New York: Marion Boyars Publishing, 1970): 66.

12
such as maintaining the subjugation of the newly “emancipated” slaves, on the one hand, and
producing subjects for labor on the other.
These are thus the conditions under which the public school system was formed: by
movements of progressives wanting to found an institution that was to be the bulwark of
democracy, producing citizens with the capacities for self-government, of industrial
capitalists wanting to support institutions that would provide them with the trained labor
necessary for the accelerating accumulation of capital, and of newly freed slaves that
genuinely wanted to improve their lot in life through education. Such ends are by no means
clear and distinct, but are intimately connected to an ideology of freedom that forms the
material heart of the history of the public schools in the United States.
* * *
As it exists today, the public school system is the state transmission of state-approved
knowledge and values to a segment of its citizenry on a compulsory and ideally non-
discriminatory basis. The public school system, according to its own legitimating rhetoric,
aims to educate students so that they might have an equal opportunity to succeed as citizens
of a democratic state. To achieve these aims, the school must educate students into a certain
understanding of the world and their “natural” place within it. That is, such an education – as
with perhaps all education – necessarily involves integrating students into particular
epistemological, normative, and social orders. In the case of public schools, this integration
is accomplished by inculcating those particular facts and values the state considers of
fundamental civic importance.
Because these issues are so complex and contestable, questions of public education
often work their way through the legal system for adjudication. On the importance of the
public schools, Justice Powell speaks for a Supreme Court majority when he says that “public
education, like the police function, fulfills a most fundamental obligation of government to
its constituency. The importance of public schools in the preparation of individuals for
participation as citizens, and in the preservation of the values on which our society rests, long
has been recognized by our decisions.”42 Moreover, in Brown v. Board of Education, Chief
Justice Warren declares that “education is perhaps the most important function of state and
local governments…It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal
instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him [or her] for later

42
Ambach v. Norwick , 441 U.S. 68, 76 (1979), reprinted in Michael W. McConnell, John H. Garvey, and
Thomas C. Berg, Religion and the Constitution. (New York: Aspen Law and Business, 2002).

13
professional training, and in helping him [or her] to adjust normally to his [or her]
environment.”43 In this way, the Court affirms the function of the public schools to be an
“‘assimilative force’ by which diverse and conflicting elements in our society are brought
together on a broad but common ground” and whose mission it is to “inculcat[e] fundamental
values necessary to the maintenance of democratic political system.”44
It is important to note that the primary subjects of this inculcation are not full rights-
bearing citizens, if such creatures exist at all. The students of public schools, that is, consist
almost exclusively of children or minors who fall under the legal jurisdiction of an adult
caregiver. While children are typically granted the status of individual human beings, they
are not granted the status of full citizens with the agency to exercise the full range of rights
available under the law. The completion of a child’s potential package of rights, then,
crucially depends upon their parents or legal guardians. So in public schooling, state power
is applied directly to individuals who are not full legal citizens, but who depend upon another
citizen to safeguard their rights in their stead. And when it comes to this citizen, too, the
state may legitimately continue to use its force to educate children against the wishes of the
child’s parent or guardian. In public schools, therefore, state power is wielded directly and
coercively over children and adults alike.
Public schools traffic in the worldviews of children, so to speak, whose legal agency
is equivocal with respect to the authority of their parents and the authority of the state. That
the state has a right – indeed, the Courts tend to couch it even as a duty – to educate its
citizens so as to facilitate them becoming active, contributing citizens of society is not often
contested. When it is contested, however, parents have traditionally maintained an
unequivocal right to withdraw their child from the public schools and either enroll them in a
private school or continue their education through home schooling. Either way, though, the
state manages to impose some sort of educational requirement for minors and children until
they become adults themselves.
Recognizing that “the State exerts great authority and coercive power through
mandatory attendance requirements, and because of the students’ emulation of teachers as
role models and the children’s susceptibility to peer pressure,” the Courts have been

43
347 U.S. 483, 493 (1954)
44
Ambach v. Norwick 441 U.S. 68, 77 (1979). Interestingly enough, the Court cites here, among others,
John Dewey’s philosophy of education as providing authoritative grounds for this understanding of the role
of public education.

14
“particularly vigilant” about mandating compliance with respect to the religious clauses of
the Constitution, but has on only one occasion (so far as I can tell) dealt with the issue of
compulsory schooling.45 In a 1925 decision that would have significant implications far
beyond the reach of compulsory public education – namely, by expanding due process
consideration to corporations as protected under the Fourteenth Amendment – the Court ruled
that children were not “mere creature[s] of the state” and that parents maintained the right to
influence their development by opting to send them to a school other than that offered by the
state.46 Importantly, the Court did not rule that parents had the liberty to opt out of educating
their children altogether, but issued a more limited ruling concerning the compulsory nature
of public education.
This compulsory nature of schooling, as I discussed above, has been a central
question for the schools since their formation in the nineteenth century. According to Ivan
Illich, the consequence of this state-imposed obligation, has been to “divide society into two
realms: some time spans and processes and treatments and professions are ‘academic’ or
‘pedagogic,’ and others are not. The power of school thus to divide social reality has no
boundaries: education becomes unworldly and the world becomes noneducational.”47
Though such a consequence could have hardly been determined in advance, it is fairly clear
now that compulsory schooling has accomplished a generalized bifurcation of experience that
has made the school the primary site of education, while the “real” world waits to be entered
upon the completion of one’s education.
But though the schools may be a privileged site of dividing social reality, such a
power is not unique to the schools alone. Rather, this power is gained by virtue of their being
a formidable institution within society more generally. Because of the necessity of
schooling, then, it is appropriate to characterize the educational system in the United States as
one of the primary institutions of cultural habituation, which, in turn, is one of the central
access points to economic privilege and social capital. So as to be better able to understand
how the schools accomplish such consequential habituation, it is important to outline some of
the important contours of an institutional analysis of the school.
An institution, most generally, is set of structures that organize the activities of
individuals in a particular way. This organization and its concomitant regulation of activity

45
Edwards v. Aguillard 482 U.S. 578 (1987)
46
Pierce v. Society of Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, 268 U.S. 510 (1925)
47
Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, 24.

15
requires legitimating as soon as it attempts to pass on the norms implicit in its organization to
a new generation of institutional members. Institutions, then, are the organization and
transmission of habits that guide the activities of its participants in a particular way. These
habits are transmitted in the processes of socialization and education, which requires certain
legitimating structures to account for the value of its habituation. There is thus a reciprocal,
dialectical relation between institutions, the habits they inculcate in their members, and the
reasons given to legitimate those activities that are considered central or typical of the
organization. As Berger and Luckmann point out, “[i]institutionalization occurs whenever
there is a reciprocal typification of habitualized actions by types of actors. Put differently,
any such typification is an institution.”48 The typification of behaviour, in other words, is the
sine qua non of institutionalization. When the activities of individuals are regulated so as to
produce a relatively homogenous or consistent series of behaviour, institutionalization is
already underway.
The regulation that produces this unified space of activity, importantly, is not strictly
limited to institutions qua buildings or even qua legally constituted bodies organized toward a
particular end; institutions, in other words, are not simply buildings or bank accounts, but are
the transmission of habits of action across generations. Institutions include all forms of
behaviour typification, some of which are tacit, such as the norms of polite conversation,
while others are more explicit, such as the conventions of public morality ensconced in
codified law. Institutions involve the ordering of life and its activities, public and private,
along channels of expectation and meaning that are reinforced through the transmission of
the set of behaviours and beliefs to the next generation. In this way, institutions can be
thought of as both the material arrangement of individuals in a given social space as well as
the constitutive patterns of conduct that delimit the bounds of meaningful and acceptable
behaviour in that place. The scope of institutions, then, extends from edifices architectural
and legal, to resource allocations financial and cultural.
Institutions are, above all, spaces of order. The space of this order, moreover, is
always constituted by a particular place. In institutions, space and place exist simultaneously,
coinciding and developing in reciprocal relation. The space of institutional order is
constituted by the material singularity of individuals and their activities existing at a
particular time and place. Put differently, institutions do not exist in the abstract, but are

48
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology
of Knowledge. (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1967): 54.

16
always constituted by actual bodies and powers existing within a given social order. In light
of this, it is important to note that:
Institutions further imply historicity and control. Reciprocal typifications of actions
are built up in the course of a shared history. They cannot be created instantaneously.
Institutions always have a history, of which they are the products….Institutions also,
by the very fact of their existence, control human conduct by setting up predefined
patterns of conduct, which channel it in one direction as against the many other
directions that would theoretically be possible….To say that a segment of human
activity has been institutionalized is already to say that this segment of human
activity has been subsumed under social control….Institutionalization is incipient in
every social situation continuing in time.49
The order that institutions impose upon activity, then, requires discipline. Varieties of
discipline are to institutions as rules are to games. Without discipline, there would be no
institutions whatsoever; without rules, there would be no such thing as games. And given
that institutions both exist within and are the operative structures of life and experience more
generally, discipline is, ipso facto, a constitutive feature of life more generally.
Discipline, in this context, refers to the specific limitations placed on behaviours
within the institutional context. But discipline, obviously, has another meaning relevant to
this discussion, namely, an area of study within formalized education. In this context, we
speak, for example, of history, chemistry, and mathematics as being separate disciplines,
each of which are marked off by discrete subject matters and distinct methodological
approaches that establish lines of demarcation between different areas of inquiry. It is neither
coincidental nor inconsequential that the word “discipline” is used in both of these contexts.
This analytical framework has the potential to dramatically expand our conception of
the way the school operates as an institution in our social life. That is, through such a
framework we can begin to think through the institutional structure and function of schooling
in several ways. The first point to note is that “the school” is not one thing. In fact, there are
only schools in the plural, existing in particular communities with particular individuals
living, working, loving and dying in everyday ways, with all the tragedies and triumph that
come with any given day. With that said, however, there are overarching structural
continuities between schools that exist in the form of laws, curricula, and other social habits

49
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, 54-55.

17
that tend to be transmitted rather uniformly across the vast bureaucratic space between each
particular school.
I have already mentioned several aspects of the legal dimension of schooling, to wit,
the way in which the state mandates compulsory schooling for its youth. One of the results
of this is what Illich calls the “schooling of society.” Turning the noun “school” into the verb
“schooling,” Illich means to capture the centrality of schools as the means of more
generalized habituation of social behavior that permeates far beyond the brick and mortar of a
given school building. As the specialized province of the schools, then, education itself has
been reduced to a rationalized process of schooling that serves as a primary means by which
social stratification is transmitted across generations. To this end, Illich notes that the “pupil
is ‘schooled’ to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a
diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His [or her]
imagination is ‘schooled’ to accept service in the place of value. Medical treatment is
mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police
protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work.”50
In this way, then, “[n]ot only education but social reality itself has become schooled.”51 He
continues:
All over the world the school has an anti-educational effect on society: school is
recognized as the institution which specializes in education….School appropriates the
money, men [and women], and good will available for education and in addition
discourages other institutions from assuming educational tasks. Work, leisure,
politics, city living, and even family life depend on schools for the habits and
knowledge they presuppose, instead of themselves the means of education.”52
The concept of schooling, then, is central to understanding the ways in which the schools are
complicit with and indeed themselves perpetuate the structural inequality across generations.
And when this concept is joined to the concept of “education as enforcement” mentioned at
the beginning of this essay, a new dimension of the schools comes to the fore in what Illich
calls its “hidden curriculum.”
This hidden curriculum consists largely in domesticating students to accepting the
inevitability of their role in the market structure, and the naturalness of their place within the

50
Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, 1.
51
Ibid., 2.
52
Ibid., 8.

18
political order. The “modern nation-state,” Gabbard notes, “has always taken the
enforcement of a market society its primary task. Across its history, compulsory schooling
has provided the state with an increasingly vital ritual for enforcing the market as the only
permissible pattern of social organization.”53 As ritual is a central feature of social
reproduction, “the ceremonial or ritual of schooling itself constitutes such a hidden
curriculum….Inevitably, this hidden curriculum of schooling adds prejudice and guilt to the
discrimination which a society practices against some of its members and compounds the
privilege of others with a new title to condescend to the majority. Just as inevitably, this
hidden curriculum serves as a ritual of initiation into a growth-oriented society for rich and
poor alike.”54 Schooling appears as completely normal or natural – indeed, inevitable –
precisely because it has become a central, compulsory social ritual in society.
But the compulsory nature of schooling is only an initial step in a process that is
followed upon by a whole host of additional institutional structures. One such structure is the
explicit curriculum, which, as Illich notes, “has always been used to assign social rank….
Universal schooling was meant to detach role assignment from personal life history: it was
meant to give everybody an equal chance to any office….However, instead of equalizing
chances, the school system has monopolized their distribution.”55 Again, historically
speaking, certain specific curricular tracks have always been tied to particular arrangements
of class. While laborers followed a technical curriculum that would supply them with the
skills necessary for industrial employment, the bourgeoisie followed a curriculum in the
liberal arts that would supply them with the background necessary for maintaining social and
political order. Thus, “neither learning nor justice is promoted by schooling because
educators insist on packaging instruction with certification. Learning and the assignment of
social roles are melted into schooling….Roles are assigned by setting a curriculum of
conditions which the candidate must meet if he is to make the grade. School links instruction
– but not learning – to these roles….It is not liberating nor education because school reserves
instruction to those whose every step in learning fits previously approved measures of social
control.”56

53
David Gabbard, “Education IS Enforcement!: The Centrality of Compulsory Schooling in Market
Societies,” in Education as Enforcement, 61.
54
Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, 33.
55
Ibid., 12.
56
Ibid.

19
 By operating as the central institution for the certification of individuals in an
increasingly competitive and dynamic labor market, the schools structure inequality today in
ways that are overwhelmingly hierarchical. Entering school under compulsion of the law,
students are then greeted by a mandated curriculum, and carefully slotted into set classrooms
with professionalized teachers who inculcate the material in a predetermined, certified way.
Paulo Freire calls this the “banking” concept of education, which entails treating the
educational experience as a transaction between “those who consider themselves
knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute
ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and
knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their
necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence.
The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their ignorance as
justifying the teacher’s existence – but, unlike the slave, they never discover that they educate
the teacher.”57 Upon completion of this curriculum, and contingent upon performance,
students are then granted access to certain sectors of social and economic capital. Failure to
succeed within this system has come, by and large, to mean “failure” within the larger social
system, i.e., immobility or restriction in employment to only low, wage-labour positions,
unemployment, poverty, and prison.
The upshot of this, according to Illich, is that we must undertake a program of
“deschooling education.”58 In much the same way as bell hooks speaks of “unlearning” the
habits of racism and sexism, we must first realize the central role that the schools play in
perpetuating such habits.59 When education is understood as the formation and reproduction
of certain personal and social habits, the focus of our analysis of schooling shifts to what
Bourdieu calls the production of habitus, or “that system of dispositions which act as a
mediation between structures and practice.”60 But this production is of special importance
with the schools because schools deal almost exclusively with children, whose habitus is not
yet fully formed. In other words, the production of habits in children is extremely significant
precisely because the habits of children are marked by a considerable degree of plasticity,

57
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), (New York: Continuum Press, 1997): 53.
58
Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, 19.
59
bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center , (Cambridge, MA: South End Press): 49. Cf.
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994).
60
Pierre Bourdieu, “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction,” in Power and Ideology in Education ,
487.

20
i.e., they are easily directed, shaped, and moulded in determinate ways. William James says
that, “the hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we
make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.
Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they
would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own
fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.”61 B ut it is precisely the fact that schooling
covers over the way habituation operates, it is not primarily the young that need to realize the
consequences of conduct in the plastic stages of development, but rather it is those who are
participating in that habituation – teachers, the state, etc. – that need to pay heed to the
process of schooling. Along with the school, the family is another institution that is highly
influential to the formation of children’s habit, but because the schools are an arm of the
state, it is crucial to analyze, challenge, and reconstruct the specific habits that the schools
reproduce.
Schooling, then, consists primarily of a habituation into a certain dependency upon
structures of authority that range from the teacher, to the employer to come, to the social and
economic expectations that shapes one’s sense of self as it is formed in childhood. This
education into dependency constitutes a central sense in which contemporary schooling can
be conceived as an education into a form of slavery. As I have discussed above, however,
education has always been conceived as a constituent feature and primary means of achieving
freedom. The conclusion that this institutional analysis of schooling presents, then, is in
striking tension with the specific ideology of freedom that has formed the legitimating basis
for public education since its inception. So in light of this we are compelled to confront the
contradictory connection between education and the schools, on the one hand, and freedom
and slavery on the other. As John Dewey points out, such connections have been made since
Plato, who identified the slave as someone who carries out the purposes of another.62
Education, then, was to be a liberating activity that freed individuals to pursue and construct
purposes of their own, according to their own needs and interests. In other words, if the
schools habituate generation upon generation into fulfilling the purposes of others, the
schools can be meaningfully said to educate people into slavery.
But if education is ideally to be a cohesive set of habits, the transmission of which
leads to an individual realizing their full potential set of capacities, then it is important to

61
William James, Principles of Psychology, Volume I, (New York: Free Dover Press, 1950): 217.
62
John Dewey, Experience and Education (1938), (New York: Touchstone Press, 1997): 67.

21
interrogate the notions of agency that underlie this ideal set of circumstances. B.F. Skinner,
in his provocative Beyond Freedom and Dignity, takes up such a project that works to
explicitly undermine the robust notions of individualized agency that predominate so much of
the Western tradition. The autonomous individual, he says, “serves to explain only the things
we are not yet able to explain in other ways.”63 Two features of autonomous man are
“particularly troublesome” for Skinner, namely, that an individual is free or autonomous in
the sense that their behavior is uncaused (or at least is caused by something called “free
will”), and that therefore that individual can be held responsible and even punished for that
64
behavior. The problem, however, is not simply that responsibility and punishment are a
direct consequence of this ideology, but that these consequences are allowed to be meted out
in the abstract, or in isolation from the contexts and conditions that gave rise to the behavior
in the first place. But when such contexts, along with their associated practices, are
accounted for, our analysis is able to reveal what were heretofore “unsuspected controlling
relations between behavior and environment.”65
Freedom, then, at least as it has been construed historically along the lines of
autonomy, agency, and unequivocal liberation from control, is an illusion. The behavior of
individuals, rather, is the direct and insuperable product of a whole host of conditions that
shape individuals and their identities in determinate ways. The picture that emerges from
Skinner’s analysis is “not of a body with a person inside, but a body which is a person in the
sense that it displays a complex repertoire of behavior.” A self, in this sense, “is a repertoire
of behavior appropriate to a given set of contingencies,” and identity “arises from the
contingencies responsible for the behavior.”66 While Skinner’s analysis challenges us to
consider the ways it is “the environment which is ‘responsible’ for the objectionable
behavior, and it is the environment, not some attribute of the individual, which must be
changed,” he nevertheless runs dangerously close to being reductionist.67 Instead of
eliminating the dualism between the individual and the environment altogether, Skinner
reduces all behavior to being only the product of conditioning environmental factors. Thus, to
simply call freedom an illusion elides the ways in which the experience of freedom is itself

63
B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971): 14.
64
Ibid., 19.
65
Ibid.
66
Ibid., 199.
67
Ibid., 74.

22
the product of a long and disparate set of histories of conditioning that structure the habitus of
individuals so as to create space in which freedom and agency can and are experienced.
Constructed as it is around the individual agent, the law is one of the central
mechanisms by which this abstraction takes place, as it cannot but fail to account for such
contexts when rendering judgments and punishments. For this reason, agency and the
autonomous individual cannot and will not depart as quickly and as gracefully as some
theorists may want: agency is not simply a theoretical construct, but is a conditioned material
experience based within a network of social cues and historical genealogies. Rather, and
precisely because agency is such a central concept in explaining human behavior and
legitimating the structures that control that behavior, agency must itself be seen as the
historical product of so many institutions and fields. As Skinner himself recognizes, “so
many fields have their specialists, and every specialist has a theory, and in almost every
theory the autonomy of the individual is unquestioned.”68 Autonomy, then, is not to be
flippantly discarded as an anachronistic theoretical construct, but must be taken into account
all the more for its centrality to prior discourses of freedom. Indeed, as Hartman argues in
the context of slave agency in nineteenth century law, the question is not whether the slave
has agency, but rather the question turns upon investigating “the myriad and infinitesimal
ways in which agency is exercised.”69
The question, then, is not whether freedom, as such, exists; freedom is not a thing
possessed or a capacity exercised. Rather, the question becomes: freedom for whom and in
what sense? When this set of questions frames the discussion, the problem, Skinner says, “is
to free men [and women], not from control, but from certain kinds of control, and it can be
solved only if our analysis takes all consequences into account….Although technology has
freed men [and women] from certain aversive features of the environment, it has not freed
them from the environment. We accept the fact that we depend upon the world around us,
and we simply change the nature of the dependency. In the same way, to make the social
environment as free as possible of aversive stimuli we do not need to destroy that
environment or escape from it; we need to redesign it.”70 Just as discipline is already at work
in any institution whatsoever, control too is always operative upon the behavior of

68
Ibid., 19.
69
Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century
America, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997): 56.
70
B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, 42.

23
individuals in any given environment. In this sense, freedom is not about some absolute
freedom from control – i.e., the ability to do what one wants when one want to – but about
freedom from certain kinds of control.
Thus, the issue to consider when inquiring into the nature of freedom turns on the
kinds of control and their varying visibility.71 And those controls that operate beneath the
surface, so to speak, are precisely the ones most in need of rigorous interrogation. Again, it
is not possible, nor desirable, to destroy all structures of control. Control, authority,
discipline, and the like, are ineliminable features of life in both its social and its biological
aspects.
To remove specific structures of oppression, then, is not to eliminate structures of
control altogether, but to reconstruct them with the aim of transforming the oppressive
consequences that result from those structures. Such reconstructive efforts cannot be
undertaken in the abstract, but must be carried out in particular places and with an acute
historical sensitivity to the conditions that have gone into their formation. Part of this
reconstruction must be to make the mechanisms of control more visible and explicit, as such
transparency would highlight the operative nature of the environment upon the course of
habituation. But, of course, the level of explicit articulation of the mechanisms of control
does not obviate the oppressive nature of control when and where it exists. Of the phrase ‘It
is better to be a conscious slave than a happy one,’ Skinner notes that, “what the slave is to be
conscious of is his misery; and a system of slavery so well designed that it does not breed
revolt is the real threat.”72 Thus, insofar as the schools function to domesticate the
experience of individuals by educating them into their “natural” place in society, reproducing
the social hierarchy by means of compulsory attendance, it has perhaps become that most
perfect system of subjugation that keeps the appearance of freedom while simultaneously
circumscribing agency within a strict set of predetermined possibilities.

71
Ibid., 67.
72
Ibid., 39.

24