In the introduction to Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks says, “that shift from beloved, all-black schools to white schools where black students were always seen as interlopers, as not really belonging, taught me the difference between education as the practice of freedom and education that merely strives to reinforce domination” (4). The differences she’s talking about here reminds me of an article I read about a year and a half ago on how schools, especially those in predominately black areas of cities, are being treated like prisons in the way they enforce dominance rather than enforcing freedom like education should do. In the article, it’s stated that “schools across New York expect poor Black and Brown kids to sit, be quiet, and obey the rules just like correctional officers expect from the disproportionate number of Black and Brown men and women housed as inmates in prisons across New York”. It’s the fact that “they are not being taught to be free thinkers” but “they are being trained to be compliant beings in order to obey arbitrary, racially-motivated rules” that hooks so intensely despises. The students at the New York school are not allowed to stand during lunch and I think that’s going a little too far.
Schools Are Prisons!
Square
This idea also stuck with me in terms of how children of color are treated similarly to prisons, and how it can reflect the imbalance and tremendous amounts of black incarcerated people. This article also reminded me of Freire’s piece and the concept of students serving as vessels to be filled with information, but this time to an extremely controlling extreme in terms of their thoughts, education, and action.
Your comparison of schools in predominantly black neighborhoods and prisons is interesting because of the “school-prison pipeline” phenomenon. Since a disproportionate number of African Americans are imprisoned, suggesting that our current societal structures work to transfer African Americans directly from school to prison, thus keeping them disempowered throughout their lives, it makes sense that predominantly black schools be compared to prisons.