So far, we have spent a considerable amount of time demonstrating that schools have often involved a great deal of coercion and that the purpose of schools in the contemporary era involve a great deal of discipline that, if rejected, tends to lead people to even harsher methods of coercion within society, with regards to prisons. Many people mistakenly believe that this is a new phenomenon on the one hand and that it is only directed at certain minority groups on the other. Neither of these assumptions is true. We have already demonstrated that the coercion intended through education is meant to include all people within contemporary Western society. Let us continue now to argue that this has always been the case, that schooling has always been viewed as something coercive. To the extent that we believe schools to primarily be a place of education and uplift, it will seem surprising that so many coercive aspects of civilization will be compared to schools, but if we see schools as instruments of indoctrination and discipline, it will make more sense.

The ancient philosopher Aristotle famously viewed slavery as school for the barbarians. During his day a large percentage of Athens’ population was made up of foreign slaves as well as freedmen who were considered as second-class citizens. The same was true in the Roman Empire and has often been true within slaveowning societies in general. What does one learn, exactly, in slavery? When one is subject to intense exploitation, the lessons that one is learning are not likely to be very pleasant ones. In many regimes, like slavery in the ancient world, hardworking slaves were able to achieve freedom and clientage with their former owners, improving their former owner’s business portfolios by engaging in profitable but socially unacceptable work on his (or her) behalf while attaining a place of some honor and respect, and thus slavery need not be a permanent state, even if it never lost the violence of the institution. Less tractable slaves who ran away from or otherwise rebelled against their masters would often find themselves mutilated, killed, or sent to deathly conditions in mining or something of the kind, while those slaves who proved to be well-socialized might find themselves in positions of trust and responsibility. In that sense, slavery served as a place to educate people of the right way to practice social graces in submission to authorities so that one could be trusted with freedom and continue to work for the best interests of the master which also allowed for a certain amount of benefit to come to those who submitted to the state that they were in and made the best of it.

Later on, European imperialists viewed their rule over their empires as being a school. It was not, however, intended as a school where the students were supposed to ever graduate. Aside from dominions which were inhabited by settler colonists who had a high degree of self-government and political freedom–and this, it should be noted, was quite hard-won–the imperial protectorates or colonies of European nations were generally not given a great degree of self-government or what we might view as training in responsible self-government. Those colonies throughout history, like the United States, which did receive extensive practice in self-government, did so largely because of the negligence and incompetence of imperial governments who belatedly sought to counter these tendencies when it was far too late to do so successfully. If we think of imperialism as a school from which one was intended to graduate and leave behind, this would be a very inaccurate view of how it was intended to be. If we view education as being designed to create elites with a high degree of identification with the imperial regime, as was especially the case in French colonies, then seeing imperialism as a school in which able students would act and behave like their imperial masters and then rule through force and fraud over their less talented and less assimilated countrymen on behalf of the imperial government is a more accurate picture.

In seeing these examples we may gather the way that schools and prisons have a far closer relationship than meets the eye. Education tends to carry with it a lot of coercion. If we are to succeed in schooling, we must spend a lot of time and effort doing things that we do not really want to do, and the purposes for learning how to do these things is not always obvious. Those students who (wisely) recognize that there is value in this and who see for themselves gain as a result of mastering difficult subjects are able to develop the self-discipline which is highly valued by society’s masters and are thus able to gain considerable rewards as a result of their reliability and their socialization, their right attitude towards learning and authority. Such people may even, eventually ,be trusted with authority as a result of having been assimilated through education to the sort of thinking that their education was filled with. On the other hand, those who reject such education out of a sense of hostility to developing habits of discipline and restraint will find themselves marked out as enemies of authorities in general and thus will always find themselves under additional restraints as a result of self-selecting themselves as open rebels and enemies of whatever system exists. The wise see learning as a means to find places where one is subject to lower levels of coercion and observation and control, and seek to find niches where they may live freely even in a world like our own which is full of a great deal of violence and oppression. The foolish make themselves targets of authority and draw negative attention upon themselves, and frequently chains and shackles for their troubles, if not futile martyrdom. To the extent that we do not desire to be coerced by others, and recognize that this world is full of coercion, it behooves us to do what is necessary to find the greatest degree of freedom that is possible to us through the cultivation of our God-given talents and abilities. To the extent that we are people of good attitudes and a lack of interest in doing harm to people and property, we can often find ourselves in positions where we are largely free to be well-behaved, which is nothing to be scoffed at and a state that all people everywhere should be able to aspire to even in such a prison world as our own is.