Prisons and Schools, Slavery and Education

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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. SentellMay 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.



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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 astoundingupsurge 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.



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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.



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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.



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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, “arestructurally 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.



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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.



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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

Containedwithin 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.



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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.



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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 $27,000in 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.



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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.



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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.



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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 politicalidealism 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.



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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).



14

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 itscitizens so as to facilitate them becoming active, contributing citizens of society is not often

contested. When i t 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.



15

“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.



16

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.



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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.



18

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 additiondiscourages 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.



19

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 theliberal 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.



20

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” thehabits 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.



21

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 instriking 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.



23

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 inwhat 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.



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 breedrevolt 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.

Prisons and Schools, Slavery and Education

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