Mandatory education imposed on children by law deprives them of the ability to consent to or remove consent of educational labour and competition. The idea that children must complete unpaid labour for a minimum of eleven years would be viewed as obscene if this law was imposed on any other group of people such as elderly people. While ageism towards children and young people may be a relatively new and seemingly radical concept, the historical opposition towards all forms of discrimination once appeared as such and that society would be doing a huge disservice to young people to dismiss their state-imposed subordination (schooling) as a natural stage of life: the only form of oppression that is natural, warranted and legitimate. Ageism is usually overt:

This focus of governmentality upon the lives of children has sought to challenge what is feared to be the spontaneous animalism or potential for unreason within human beings, forces which, we are now encouraged to believe, are at their most pure, least controllable and most potent during childhood. It is through the definition and regulation of this supposed unreason within children that we can also identify childhood as one of the categories of resistance against a regulation which seeks to impose itself in the name of reason. (Billington, 2000, p. 24)

Ageism is commonly understood as discrimination towards older people whilst ageism towards young people is commonly viewed as for their own good or within a child’s best interests. “Ageism is increasingly being recognised as a form of oppression parallel with sexism and racism (Thompson, 1995a; Phillipson & Thompson, 1996). However, the concept is applied exclusively or primarily to discrimination against older people, with little or no recognition that ageism can also relate to the situation of children” (Thompson, 1997, p. 59). Officer and de la Fuente-Núñez (2018) reveal the gaps in policy and global research in regards to ageism and how, despite it being a legitimate form of discrimination, it receives “little attention” (para. 8) and therefore no real attempts to combat it. It is stated, however, that the history of other forms of discrimination (such as racism and sexism) indicates a global trend of eliminating all forms of oppression and that doing so results in “more prosperous and equitable societies” (para. 5).

Age-based expectations can be manipulated to uphold other forms of discrimination such as the infantilisation of disabled people (Capri & Swartz, 2018), of elderly people (Hepworth, 1996) and of women (see Hockey & James, 1999); this treatment is received as “deeply humiliating” and is characterised by focusing on these groups’ “passivity, vulnerability and dependence” (Hockey & James, 1999, p. 304). Moreover, it has been found that black boys are perceived as far older than they are, seen as adults from as young as thirteen years old and therefore viewed as responsible for their actions, denied the assumption of innocence that their white peers are granted until their late 20s (Goff et al., 2014, p. 540-541). Similarly, the “adultification” of female children and adolescents in the media appropriates their perceived passivity and innocence by applying a costume of sexual agency, allowing patriarchal society to blame its sexualisation of minors on the victims themselves (Sepeno & Aubrey, 2017; Egan, 2013). Age, therefore, is not a fixed state despite its apparently being so being the main justification of schooling and, indeed, of ageism. Age, particularly young age, is a perception of innocence which can be manipulated to target certain children.

Corporal punishment

Corporal punishment was made illegal in UK state schools in 1986 and private schools were included in this ban in 2003. A huge victory for young people; however, perhaps it would be naïve to assume that the attitudes and motivations that perpetuated systemic violence towards children vanished with the introduction of this law. Punitive inclinations towards children still remain:

Elitism, exclusion, prejudice, greed and despair will not end just by being recognised more clearly as unjust, just as slavery did not end when formally abolished, women were not emancipated simply by being allowed to vote and the child abuse of dangerous labour did not end with the Factory Acts. (Dorling, 2010, p. 309)

Foucault (1991) explores how the criminal justice system evolved during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from a spectacular display of violence to a disciplinary system involving what one might describe as a closeted psychological torture – a removal of rights and autonomy lasting long periods of time. A system of surveillance and control replaced celebrations of torture and gore on the streets as to appease members of the public who found violence to be offensive: “if it is still necessary for the law to reach and manipulate the body of the convict, it will be at a distance, in the proper way, according to strict rules, and with a much ‘higher’ aim.” (Foucault, 1991, p. 11). Foucault makes the argument throughout Discipline and Punish that, following disciplinary reformation in Europe between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mass schooling and mass production in factories were at the forefront of modern society in the nineteenth century. Labour surveillance of a multitude of prisoners, workers or children were issues that were being simultaneously addressed at this time. Bentham’s Panopticon was the answer to these problems (Fludernik, 2015).

Autonomy

A prisoner’s rights are removed and they are forced to obey commands as a result of a crime that they are committed of; a child’s rights withheld and they are strongly encouraged to obey commands because they are young. Schoolchildren are expected to obey parents, a power dynamic that teachers depend on, and obey teachers, a transfer of power from parents to the state. Children’s safety largely depends on their obedience and to their parents. Children’s evolutionary psychology may predispose them to blind obedience as they may subconsciously fear the removal of love, acceptance, food or shelter as a result of disobedience (Duncan, 2010).

MacIntyre (1987) suggests that teachers are given a contradictory mission whereby they must encourage a child’s free-thinking individuality and also prepare them for predetermined societal roles. This is echoed by Carr (1997) who describes the competing mission of education as “realising the ‘potential of the individual’” and “’meeting the needs of society’” (p. 311). The two are incompatible due to conservative capitalism as change can be expensive. If society begins to question the integrity of schooling and ageism, other such disciplinary systems and power structures, such as the prison and law, may become vulnerable to reformation or abolition. This could be expensive for the corporations that use prison labour. As Corrigan and Firth (1977) state: “the importance of education for capitalism is revealed by the state’s action in taking control of educational institutions and expanding them” (as quoted in Meighan & Harber, 2007, p. 329).

The removal of children’s autonomy in schools, through strict rules and discipline, and their subsequent indoctrination is a process that undermines democracy. The Greek origin of the word ‘democracy’ means ‘the people’ (dēmos) and ‘power’ (kratia). These state-governed institutions (the prison and the school) are the antithesis of people-power.

One does not become less of a person when one commits a crime and one does not suddenly become a person at eighteen years of age. Figures such as Greta Thunberg (who arranged the ‘School Strike for Climate’ in 125 countries across the planet, aged fifteen) and Malala Yousafzai (who survived a misogynistically motivated assassination attack, aged fifteen, and was the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, aged seventeen) have demonstrated that, not only are children not necessarily free from political conflict, they are also prepared and intellectually equipped to influence politics on a global scale, yet they cannot vote in elections and neither can prisoners. Thompson (1997) argues that children are labelled with “socially constructed life stages which help to retain power and influence in the hands of those who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo” (p. 60).

Mandatory obedience

It is beneficial to a child for an adult to correct their manners because manners make society receive a person well; however, it may also be true that this method of teaching (correction and possible humiliation) may make a child resent manners and may cause some to associate humiliation with politeness (see Willis, 1978) which is operant conditioning (Skinner, 1948). Another example of learning by association would be mandatory outdoor play during winter: it will desensitise children to the cold and is beneficial to them, making them more resilient; however, this could also have the effect of making children avoidant of the outside as they may come to associate it, through classical conditioning, with the desire to be warm (see Pavlov, 1897/1902). It commonly asserted that young children struggle with episodic foresight (imagining future consequences and scenarios), yet it is proven that both older children and adults also share this problem (Kramer et al., 2016). These examples demonstrate the good intentions behind school rules and adult rearing (aiming to resolve a child’s lack of episodic foresight) but they also show how lack of episodic foresight, in regards to child psychology, is also prevalent in adult ways of thinking. Perhaps children struggle to see long-term benefits of certain behaviours while adults struggle to see the long-term consequences of their demands.

If adults were to explain why manners are important or why being outside is healthy to children then children can make their own informed decisions. Social pressure and logical reasoning would make children likely to adopt socially desirable behaviour without the need for rules, instruction or punishment as children learn from imitation (Nsamenang, 2006). If teachers were polite and used manners generously when speaking to children, or moved the staffroom outdoors during the winter, then it would demonstrate the importance of these behaviours without hypocrisy confusing these lessons; it would show rather than tell. More importantly, it would preserve children’s free will. In adult-child relationships, a child has very limited free will as they are positioned as inferior, in law and stature, and do not have the ‘right’ to bypass the will of adults. Thompson (1997) argues that “citizenship should not be seen as a status acquired only when one ‘comes of age’. However, it needs to be recognised that there will be times when children’s rights and children’s welfare will be in conflict” (p. 60).

“Child abuse in any form is a tragedy” (Gershoff, 2002, p. 550). Historically, children were physically abused in schools; today, verbal abuse and emotional abuse are common in the classroom (McEachern et al., 2008, p. 3). “Emotional maltreatment” can be defined as “any disciplinary or motivational practice that psychologically hurts children” (Hyman & Snook, 1999, p. 71); discipline and punishment arguably has the intention of emotional maltreatment to discourage or “correct” misbehaviour without violence. For example, detention makes a child miss and long for their friends, shouting frightens children into attention, and “withholding warmth” and harsh criticism (McEachern et al., 2008, p. 3) encourages self-loathing. “Corporal punishment has been long debated as a method of correcting children, yet other methods of discipline should also be subject to exacting scientific scrutiny” (Gershoff, 2002, p. 567). As Foucault (1991) carefully demonstrates, non-violent discipline has the same intention as older, violent forms of discipline: to punish.

Forced labour in prison and school

Firstly, it must be recognised and contemplated that children have a six-hour working day that is imposed on them by law. Home-schooling is unpopular due to the social disadvantage so roughly only 3% are home-schooled (Prothero & Samuels, 2020). Most children labour in schools five days a week.

Forced labour within the US prison system is achieved through “open coercion and violence” and is often described as “modern slavery” (Johnson, 2018). This system “allows corporations to profit from punishment that is disproportionately allocated to people of colour and the poor” (Silva & Samimi, 2018, p. 153). Prison labour is inflicted upon a “captive workforce” which is used by “thousands of U.S. corporations to cut costs and increase profits” (p. 153). Prisoners who refuse are put in solitary confinement (Johnson, 2018). Roughly, two-million people are incarcerated in the US and $3,000 profit is made on average per inmate (Silva & Samimi, 2018, p. 156), making prison labour potentially a multi-billion dollar industry. This incentivises incarceration (Sliva & Samimi, 2018, p. 153). Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer and social justice activist, once said that “slavery didn’t end in 1865, it just evolved” (Seslowsky, 2018), much like Foucault’s depiction of the evolution of torture:

The ideal point of penalty today would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgement that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination, a procedure that would be at the same time the permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptotic movement that strives to meet in infinity. The public execution was the logical culmination of a procedure governed by the Inquisition. The practice of placing individuals under ‘observation’ is a natural extension of a justice imbued with disciplinary methods and examination procedures. Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penalty? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons? (Foucault, 1991, p. 227-228)

This stunning quote describes the institutions of the state that Illich (1971, p. 3) warns of the public’s dependence on all resembling each other due to their methods of surveillance. How does schooling differ from prison labour? Firstly, the conditions of prison are harsher and one is incarcerated permanently, whereas pupils may go home every day. Inmates are paid at the rate of $2.00 a day (Law, 2011) while pupils are not paid at all. Inmates are fed, clothed and housed by the state, costing £240 per day or £87,647 per year per inmate in one prison located in Milton Keynes (MacLeod, 2020), whereas children are expected to pay for their own food and their own uniforms. Prisoners may be subjected to violence whereas this is now illegal in schools. Inmates have broken the law; captivity and prison labour are apparently their justly punishment as is losing the right to privacy and freedom; “schoolteachers […] are the only professionals who feel entitled to pry into the private affairs of their clients at the same time as they preach to a captive audience” (Illich, 1971, p. 31). Both institutions are constructed by “small acts of cunning endowed with a great power of diffusion, subtle arrangements, apparently innocent, but profoundly suspicious, mechanisms that obeyed economies too shameful to be acknowledged” (Foucault, 1991, p. 139).

Undeniably, there are striking similarities between the institution of the school and the prison as both operate as a coercive model of labour surveillance and punishment of below-average achievement (Foucault, 1991). “If prison is the exemplar of modern discipline in Discipline and Punish, school is cast according to its image” (Wolosky, 2013, p. 288). The level of innocence of prisoners and pupils could not be more different, yet the institutions they are bound to attend by law are very similar. Children cannot consent to school – their parents will be prosecuted if they withdraw their consent. These practices go beyond coercion and are, indeed, forceful; “the claim that a liberal society can be founded on the modern school is paradoxical” (Illich, 1971, p. 31).