Introduction
Whether we are learning or being punished the idea of Michel Foucault's Panopticism can be implied throughout the K - 12 American school system. These ideas, issues, concerns, and dystopia foreshadowing has been suggesting to us a social motif. From resuscitating generations of social culture and social structure made for young adolescents comes a much more dying system of educational policies creating youth prisons known as the educational system. These bureaucratic guidelines and services only serve as a tool for panoptic learning. In the article "Against Schooling: Education and Social Class" Stanley Aronowitz writes,
"At the dawn of the new century no American institution is invested with a greater role to bring the young and their parents into the modernist regime than public schools. The common school is charged with the task of preparing children and youth for their dual responsibilities to the social order: citizenship and, more important, learning to labor."
The idea of a utopia social structure provided for students is merely an optical illusion within a complex dilemma. Within this structure adolescents are being watched and controlled by an organized system of hierarchy. In the article "Symbolic Meaning in Safety Measures" Phil Brocato states that safety policies such as metal detectors, surveillance cameras, and security officers can be interpreted from students as a social prison. Furthermore, in "Disciplining Bodies: On the Continuity of Power Relations in Pedagogy" Jennifer M Gore writes, "Foucault (1977) argues that 'disciplinary power' emerged with the advent of modern institutions and extended throughout society, so that continuities in power relations are evident not only in schools, hospitals, prisons, factories, and other institutions, but also outside of these institutions: 'A certain significant generality moved between the least irregularity and the greatest crime: it was no longer the offense, the attack on the common interest, it was the departure from the norm, the anomaly; it was this that haunted the school, the court, the asylum or the prison'"
In the following discourse, these supplementary essays, along with the main texts, will examine the social influences of discipline, punishment, conformity, social norm, and contemporary pedagogical practices within the educational system.
When comparing the film "A Clockwork Orange" and the novel "The Stranger" both characters parallel as eccentric individuals within a society built upon a specific social system. Deviating from this social system suggests a correction designed to restore unity. Characters such as the youthful Alex represent the initiation of conformity.
Reflecting from strict cultural standards "Planet of the Apes" provokes the ideas of miscegenation, reversal role within a community of hierarchy, and social justice.
