Panopticon: The Similarities Between Schools And Prisons

Today, schools are constantly noted that they resemble a prison in that both are meant to discipline and punish the students just like prisoners. People may believe such comparisons between schools and prisons is a wrong one since schools are teaching students and allowing them to achieve a bright future unlike prisons. The truth is both prisons and school have an immense power over their inhabitants, even without directly exercising it. Michel Foucault introduced an idea known as the Panopticism, adapted from an architectural figure called Bentham’s Panopticon. The Panopticon is a circular prison building where prisoners are placed in cells that are isolated from one another disabling them from watching each other. The guards station remains at the center of the building allowing them to watch every prisoner, unseen by the prisoner. This enforces a sense of power from the guards and a sense of fear by the prisoners, since the prisoner doesn’t know when they are being watched they will always behave accordingly. Foucault then argues in Discipline and Punish (1975) that the panopticon
“serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution …show more content…
Students become obedient and docile like the prisoners, the school creates norms such as doing your homework, passing the test and being quiet to test their obedience. Even when no one is checking the students’ homework, giving out test or asking the student to be quiet they are still performing it. By defunding public education, the government is under the impression that the parents of these students will continue to send their children to school even if it’s cost more money out of their pocket because no parent wants to see their children labeled as disobedient and