The social and economic implications of the quality education that children in the United States of America receive while not absolute are critical in determining their future trajectories. The institution that children come into contact with the most in their prepubescent, formative years outside of their communities are schools. From both an operational and architectural standpoint, public schools function as an important organization in socializing and routinizing the behaviors of the youngest segments of the population. Pioneering educators such as Stanley Hall called for the creation of pedocentric schools where the institution’s paramount mission was to serve the social and psychological needs of children. In fact, Hall notably characterized pre-adolescent children as “savages” and therefore rationalized that reasoning with them was a futile effort. Rather, he proposed that the panacea for society’s degenerates- poor and urban communities -was a good dose of authoritarian discipline. Social and education reformers of his ilk in the early 20th century believed that public schools were in many cases, the last and only life line to save children from their predestined fate of failure.
As Pedro Antonio Noguera explains in his book Preventing Violence in Schools Through The Production of Docile Bodies, “It was to the school that progressives turned as the institution that would at least complement familial education and in many instances correct it and compensate for its shortcomings. The school would rear the children of ordinary families, it would provide refuge for the children of exploitative families, and it would acculturate the children of immigrant families…the school would deliver whatever services children needed to develop into health, happy and well-instructed citizens – it would provide meals for the poorly fed, medical treatment for the unhealthy, and guidance for the emotionally disturbed…Though progressives asserted the primacy of familial education, they advanced the pre-eminence of schooling”. Ultimately, the school operated as a repressive space that used mechanisms to create and embed a racialized social order in the psyche of America’s children. The repressive technologies used in these spaces provoked behaviors that in turn were criminalized at the outset of the school yard-to-prison yard pipeline.
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