Schooling as imprisonment

It is based on a rationalist, market-ready notion of knowledge as organized, sophisticated and accessible only via instruments modern civilization provides. The rituals of degrees and certificates, grades and classes, curricula and instructors all play into this narrative, this metaphor. The tragedy of schooling is what it excludes: other ways of knowing and being in the world. It excludes language/culture in all its nuanced complexities. And language isn’t merely what happens within the world, it’s how worlds are discursively and materially produced. It is in this sense that schooling is the attempted imprisonment of consciousness.