“School is, not only not prison, it is the opposite of prison”

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Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
“School is, not only not prison, it is the opposite of prison”
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Basbøll nails it , with his characteristic realistic-but-not-cynical clarity:
When Oscar Wilde said that “suffering is one very long moment” he was serving two year’s of hard labor in prison. Bentham’s utilitarian archictectures nowithstanding, it’s important to keep in mind that school is, not only not prison, it is the opposite of prison. “School” comes from the Greek word for “spare time, leisure, rest, ease; idleness.” . . . it is nothing like a prison, except that it walls us off, for a time, from the ordinary business of living. Wilde’s suffering was unbearable because his respite from this business was not chosen freely. . . . The trick is not so see your time at university as “one very long moment” but to “divide it by seasons”, by semesters, by weeks, and days and hours. . . .
As Chesterton might have said, cynicism is the realism of fools.
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