Comparing Foucault's Discipline And Punishment

College involves a process that has been deeply engrained in our brains ever since we were young’uns. The concept of conformity is widely accepted and promoted in that particular social institution and other similar ones in society with the same design and concept, which functions to essentially debilitate and control specific demographics. For instance, there is not much distinction between elementary school, middle school, high school, and college. Similarly, they all involve following both unwritten and written rules, social norms, and conduct in a religious and attentive manner or else there are extreme consequences that must be faced in response. Evidently, those social institutions do not allow much freedom and individuality to be permitted.
This discrepancy can also be seen in other social institutions in which conformity is strongly advocated. This is not surprising because school is really nothing more than a normalized prison in society. In Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punishment, he discusses the plague in the seventeenth century that led to a variety of measures taken to adequately deal with the problem running rampage at the time. Some measures taken concerned “a strict spatial partitioning: the closing of the town and its outlying districts, a prohibition to leave the town on pain of death, the killing of all stray animals: the division of the town into district quarters, each governed by an intendant” (page 282). Through those actions, order was able to be accomplished in the midst of the plague. The lepers, who were suffers of leprosy were individuals considered to be abnormal during the plague and forced to separate from society in order to create a “pure society”. As a result, discipline was created and a disciplined community was able to be maintained without any issues. The situation of the plague shows clearly how institutions implement techniques to measure and supervise those that they consider to be abnormal through disciplinary mechanisms. In the case of the plague, discipline was able to be achieved through the fear of the plague. Clearly, modern disciplinary mechanisms are extracted from those techniques,
This is evident from the foundations of schools and other social institutions that are based on the concept of the panopticon. The panopticon is an institutional building designed by Jeremy Bentham, an English philosopher and social theorist. His panopticon involves a building containing a tower located at the center, therefore allowing each cell of a prisoner or schoolboy incarcerated to be seen. Michel Foucault says, “Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which is ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap”. In the same retrospect, the same false ideology can be applied to education since similarly, it is also a trap. Evidently, there are so much problems that exist in the educational system. Schools are associated with the provision of knowledge and promotion of individual growth, but it does not solely and adequately allow it because schools teach you what to think instead of how to think. In addition, the panopticon disallows individuals to communicate with the warders or other prisoners. The permanent visibility allows there to be a sense of power provided to the warders. Through Bentham’s design of the panopticon, he suggests that the functioning of power should be visible and undetectable so that the prisoner can see the tower, yet not know whether or not they are being observed. This disciplinary mechanism is