Electric Dirt Farmer

In a recent commentary for the L.A. Times Thomas Szasz, a Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Suny in Syracuse, argues that government schools have become prisons established for the purpose of controlling their inmates rather than educating them. He is certainly not the only person making this point, and with many schools — attendance at which is usually required by law — being gated with metal detectors and patrolled by uniformed security guards the connection is not at all difficult to make.

Schools are prisons, to which children are sentenced by compulsory education and truancy laws. School-prisons may be used to serve the following purposes: teaching literacy and mathematics–a goal that can be met in six years, or by the time a child is 12; vocational education or preparation for a higher education–goals that are not justified, and in fact, are hindered by, compulsion; social control, which requires and justifies compulsion and is antithetical to giving teenagers a choice about school attendance.

If Prof. Szasz is correct, and there is evidence in his favour, then the occasional “prison uprising” (i.e. school shooting) should be entirely unsurprising.

“Protect me from my friends; I will take care of my enemies,” says an old proverb. American children today have nothing but friends.

Is it any wonder they are bored, frustrated, angry, troubled and poorly educated and that, occasionally, some of them engage in desperate acts of destruction?

Hat tip to LewRockwell.Com