If You Don’t Go to School, You Go to Jail
Coming back to James Herndon’s “explanatory notes” on the American education system, here’s my favorite one.
If You Don’t Go to School, You Go to Jail
I don’t know if this is true in every country, but we have compulsory education in the US. That means that every child from the age of 6–16 must be in some kind of a school. And if they are absent from that school for too many days, the state has the authority to bring charges against the parents, which also affect the child.
In Michigan, parents can get a $500 fine and 90 days in jail.
In Illinois, you can get a $1,500 fine and 30 days in jail.
In Georgia it is a $1,000 fine and 60 days in jail. If a student is found “out and about” during the school day, it can result in more fines and jail time.
In 2014, a woman in Pennsylvania died in jail because she couldn’t pay her child’s truancy fees.
And it’s not just parents. Students also can be affected, getting their driving license suspended or banned from extra curricular activities. In Texas in 2012, a student was put in jail for 24 hours for excessive truancy.
Whether or not these laws are fair or not isn’t the point here (though I think we can all agree that last one is a little outrageous).
The point that Herndon makes is that because students or parents can get put in jail for not going to school, school just has to be better than jail.
“If kids in America do not go to school, they can be put in jail. No matter how bad the school is, it is better than jail.”
How are you supposed to judge if the school system is doing a good job educating someone if there is no way to opt out of the system entirely?
It’s like an experimenter in charge of getting rats to complete a maze faster. She thinks that candy will motivate them better than cheese. So she sets up the experiment, but before she does, she tells the rats that if they choose not to do the maze, they will be killed.
As ridiculous as that sounds, it’s very similar to the situation we have now. Whether or not the cheese or the candy is better doesn’t mean much when the rats are only running because they’d prefer to run rather than die.
When the only alternative to school is jail, it makes it hard to believe they are getting the best results.
Again, from Herndon:
“The school can never learn anything about its students or how they learn as long as there is this threat hanging over them. Well, you can do this assignment, or you can go to jail.”
Due to this, a school or teacher can never boast about their methods and results. Because at the end of the day, the students were only doing it because if they (or their parents) didn’t want to go to jail.
That’s a bad place to start.
