Comparing Foucault's Discipline And Punishment

College involves a process that has been deeply engrained in our brains ever since we were young’uns. The concept of conformity is widely accepted and promoted in that particular social institution and other similar ones in society with the same design and concept, which functions to essentially debilitate and control specific demographics. For instance, there is not much distinction between elementary school, middle school, high school, and college. Similarly, they all involve following both unwritten and written rules, social norms, and conduct in a religious and attentive manner or else there are extreme consequences that must be faced in response. Evidently, those social institutions do not allow much freedom and individuality to be permitted.
Even in college, the circumstances and conditions that exist in the institution is still very restrictive. Despite independence, growth, and adulthood being commonly attached to college, this is clearly not the case in many aspects of the educational system. The mentality cultivated in schools is the concept of conformity and to not render though fully and independently without the influence of overbearing forces. Clearly, social institutions like schools prepare us for the "real world" in which rules and laws are strongly enforced and deference is strongly encouraged.
There is a strong misconception about schools and the entire educational system.
This discrepancy can also be seen in other social institutions in which conformity is strongly advocated. This is not surprising because school is really nothing more than a normalized prison in society. In Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punishment, he discusses the plague in the seventeenth century that led to a variety of measures taken to adequately deal with the problem running rampage at the time. Some measures taken concerned “a strict spatial partitioning: the closing of the town and its outlying districts, a prohibition to leave the town on pain of death, the killing of all stray animals: the division of the town into district quarters, each governed by an intendant” (page 282). Through those actions, order was able to be accomplished in the midst of the plague. The lepers, who were suffers of leprosy were individuals considered to be abnormal during the plague and forced to separate from society in order to create a “pure society”. As a result, discipline was created and a disciplined community was able to be maintained without any issues. The situation of the plague shows clearly how institutions implement techniques to measure and supervise those that they consider to be abnormal through disciplinary mechanisms. In the case of the plague, discipline was able to be achieved through the fear of the plague. Clearly, modern disciplinary mechanisms are extracted from those techniques,
which aim to regulate those that society deems to be abnormal.
Colleges, specifically, function to educate on social norms and conduct instead of promoting the idea of individuality.
This is evident from the foundations of schools and other social institutions that are based on the concept of the panopticon. The panopticon is an institutional building designed by Jeremy Bentham, an English philosopher and social theorist. His panopticon involves a building containing a tower located at the center, therefore allowing each cell of a prisoner or schoolboy incarcerated to be seen. Michel Foucault says, “Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which is ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap”. In the same retrospect, the same false ideology can be applied to education since similarly, it is also a trap. Evidently, there are so much problems that exist in the educational system. Schools are associated with the provision of knowledge and promotion of individual growth, but it does not solely and adequately allow it because schools teach you what to think instead of how to think. In addition, the panopticon disallows individuals to communicate with the warders or other prisoners. The permanent visibility allows there to be a sense of power provided to the warders. Through Bentham’s design of the panopticon, he suggests that the functioning of power should be visible and undetectable so that the prisoner can see the tower, yet not know whether or not they are being observed. This disciplinary mechanism is
intentionally implemented as a way to control power. The panopticon allows a lot of people to be controlled while also lowering the amount of people necessary to allow the operations of power. In this power dynamics, the warders do not have to always observe each inmate to check if they are behaving and following rules. So, “the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” and prisoners have to constantly act in accordance to rules out of fear of being caught breaking them. Clearly, the application of the panopticon is implemented into parts of society such as schools as a way to control and regulate the behavior of students. Students must abide and act accordingly to rules or else there are consequences.
College is a social institution that involves the persist following of rules in order for there to be “order”. In the modern world, a "gentler" method of punishing criminals is applied in which they are imprisoned instead of tortured or murdered. Although, the method of reform appears to be enlightened and relatively reasonable, such reform is still a mechanism of effective control. He says, “To punish less, perhaps; but certainly to punish better”. Despite the difference in purposes of many institutions, they still have the fundamental foundations of institutions with innocuous purposes. Therefore, causing the modern system of disciplinary power. Basically, society is controlled by the new mode of punishment, which entails that factories, hospitals, and schools are modeled by the modern prison. Model "disciplinary" society encompasses three main methods of control, which are hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and the examination. He emphasizes that something as simple as observing people can allow society to apply control over them. He expands on this system of observation in which the power from prisoners is clearly shifted to guards in prisons. For instance, disciplinary control can be obtained through nonobservance. Evidently, modern disciplinary systems aim to correct deviant behavior and cause reformation in terms of societal norms. Observation is a way of discipline to achieve normalization. Unsurprisingly, the observational prison mirrors strongly factories, schools, and hospitals. In modern society, discipline and punishment are the core elements, embedded inside. Commonly, model society concentrates on the idea that all citizens are free and capable of making demands to the state. Foucault makes it clear why the distinction between prisons, schools, factories, and hospitals are barely evident. The similarities between those social institutions is because they engage in the deliberate examination of students, workers, patients, and prisoners and proceed to categorize them and essentially, force them to conform to the “norm”. He emphasizes the similar conditionalities in prisons that exist in those social institutions. School forces upon normalization and conformity. Regulation of movement and time and surveillance of body and thought is just a method to obtain domesticity. Clearly, school is a prison, which hold individuals’ captive, not physically but mentally and emotionally.