emotional oppression that they suffer is incomparable to slavery. Maybe so, although not everyone would agree that even “successful” state education has a benign effect. Our point, however, is not that the conditions young people oppose in schools are equivalent to the conditions slaves opposed. We are saying only that the fact of young people’s resistance to schooling and the fact of slaves running away and seeking to free themselves both have and had the parallel political effect of white people coming into conflict with each other in reaction to the slaves’ and their descendants’ actions.
Still, it is hard to ignore the obvious parallels between the plantation owners’ analysis of slave behavior and the typical theories and systems of control employed by most twenty-first century schools for young people in poverty. Both systems rely on coercion, because they interpret the slaves’ or students’ motives as either bestial or diseased. For example: “In working niggers, we always calculate that they will not labor at all except to avoid punishment, and they will never do more than just enough to save themselves from being punished, and no amount of punishment will prevent their working carelessly or indifferently.”17 The same theories in almost the same words can be heard in many staff lounges, and not only from white teachers. The punishments envisioned are various humiliations along the lines of course failure and “being written up” as first steps toward physical exclusion from the class or school. Not only informal attitudes, but the official policies of most schools for adolescents in poverty assume that without “consequences” (the twentieth-century euphemism for “punishment”), students would do no academic work at all, probably would not even bother attending school or classes, and would, most likely, run amok. A whole panoply of physical movements are alternately prescribed and proscribed: where the students must or may not sit; where they must or may not go; which doors they are required and which doors they are forbidden to use; which books or materials they must or may not touch; which websites they may see or must not see; when they must stand and when they may not stand; when they may use the bathroom; when they may eat; when they may or must leave the building; when they may or must speak. All these modal constraints depend utterly on punishment and the threat of punishment. Well-run schools, like well-run plantations, are places where the “consequences” for violating requirements are swift and certain. And for most teachers, administrators, students, and parents, it is unthinkable that students would go where they are “supposed to,” “do their work,” or “stop talking” unless they feared punishment—humiliation, failure, or physical exclusion. Plantations developed elaborate pass systems to control the movements of slaves, and schools for children in poverty often require all students outside of class to carry a pass issued by a teacher or authority. Slaveholders developed systems of patrol to prevent unauthorized movements and to return slaves to the plantations. Schools for students in poverty hire police, security officers, and “hall monitors” to patrol inside schools, demanding to see passes, and police daily arrive at schools with vanloads of truant students who have been apprehended for existing where they do not belong. Places of detention and humiliation, stocks and stockades, were established to confine difficult, unruly slaves. Schools for poor children have “in-school suspension” centers where disobedient students must sit all day, often forbidden to speak. The official, written policy in the school where I teach commands that students on “in-school suspension” must sit facing the wall, each young person forbidden to look at any other. The policy does not yet require students to be placed in physical stocks.
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