Schools as Black-Holes by Butler Shaffer

Ask yourself whether, at any stage in your formalized education, you were encouraged to think outside the boundaries of the assigned curriculum. Were the institutional keepers of the questions you were expected to pursue tolerant of any independent inquiries you might undertake? Might continued efforts to pursue your own agenda of discovery land you in the principal’s office or, worse, subject you to behavior-modifying drugs or other treatment? At what point – if at all – did it become evident to you that the system of formal education to which you had been sentenced had, as its purpose, the turning of you and your fellow inmates into well-conditioned servo-mechanisms whose energies were to be devoted to fostering institutional interests?

More: Schools as Black-Holes by Butler Shaffer

I personally think that public institutional schools are like prisons, or maybe more like purgatory, because when you wake up and have the desire to escape, it is within your power. If only students weren't being institutionalized en mass, almost fast-tracked from school to the prison system.