U.S. History is possibly the longest class ever. Yes, it is the same 100 minutes in length as all other block periods at Sequoia High School in Redwood City, California, yet it feels like the time stretches out for hours and hours. The big hand on the clock seems to have a hangover every time I enter that class, slumping lazily and painfully slowly around one and two-thirds times before reaching possibly the most incredibly and merciful time of the day: 11:40 AM. Which can be translated by any Sequoia High School student into two words: lunch time.

I ram my binder into my overstuffed backpack, crumpling papers and books alike, hurriedly zipping it closed and racing out of the classroom. I’m on the top floor, at the end of the science wing (I have absolutely no idea why my History class is at the end of the science wing, but there it is), and just around the corner lies freedom.

I run down the stairs, skipping them two at a time in my haste. When I reach the bottom I am met with two doors, and I slam one of them open. The cool November air meets my face with a startling chill, and I lose a bit of my excitement as I bundle up against the cold.

I walk out from under the archway, out into the open. My destination: the B quad, where only fellow juniors hang out, and where my friends and I are not yelled at nor forced to pick up trash nor forced to clean up spilled food nor forced to clean desks of writing and gum just because we like to play hackey-sack at lunch. This, we have discovered, is frowned upon when one enters High School. At least, the ridiculously large security guards don’t like it very much. Hence our moving to the B-Quad.

I haven’t reached the B-Quad yet; it’s a wee bit of a walk from the science wing. As I’m walking, I turn my head to the left, and am met with a sight that I see practically every day I walk to lunch.

There, drawing the tall, spiked gates closed, drawing the heavy metal chain and locking the great giant lock, is one of the massive security guards. I see this every time I pass because I hear the huge metal gate screeching shut, and if its not that, then it’s the sound of the gigantic chains clanking against the fence as they are wrapped tightly around and around, making sure no one escapes.

And to my right is another security guard, locking the gate to the teacher parking lot, emitting the same clanking and screeching noises in the process. He pauses in the process, having spotted a student attempting a break at freedom, and within seconds he’s radio-ed his fellow Terminators and is now shouting and waving at whoever it was who simply wanted to know what the outside world was like.

Whenever I pass by these colossal security guards, and whenever I see these giant people locking us in the boundaries of our completely isolated and “secure” environment, I can’t help but be reminded of scenes from films such as Escape from Alcatraz, The Shawshank Redemption, O Brother Where Art Thou and, most especially, Chicken Run. I know I certainly feel like a chicken being caged inside this place ridiculously isolated from the world around, yet claiming to prepare us to enter this very same world. I don’t know about you, but I think that rings a little false…

And now the gargantuan is telling me to keep moving, and so I do: he could kill me just by breaking wind in my direction. Therefore, I make my way to the B quad and lay my backpack down upon the cold stone steps surrounding the courtyard. I sigh, looking around at the quad, and my eyes meet the three security cameras pointed directly at us. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to eat when cameras are pointed directly at you, just staring and watching, but it’s slightly difficult. However, we have no choice. This is the only place where we won’t get in trouble for kicking a ball around, and if we try to leave, we’ll get impaled by the spikes on the tops of the fences surrounding us. God, I love school.

We all bring our own lunches, because buying school lunch is a horrific affair. You wait in line for half an hour, guards shouting at you to not cut and to shut your face, and when you finally get to the front the lunch ladies scream at you to hurry up, and so you practically vomit trying to talk fast but also above the roar of all the students around you. Half the time they don’t understand you, and when they do, there is only a 33% (we actually did the math) chance that they will have what you want.

You leave with something you didn’t want sloping over the sides of your undersized tray, leaving a trail behind you. We’ve only had one food poisoning encounter, and my friend only vomited eight times. So it’s all good.

I can’t tell you how many times I feel like I’m in the movie Holes, being told where to go, what to do, how to do it, when to do it. Everyday is like digging another hole: long, hard, repetitive, boring, unhelpful, agonizing, and tiresome. I now get headaches every other day, and have to sneak Ibuprofren in (we’re not allowed to have any) so I don’t rip my hair out in pain.

It has been projected that, by the year 2012-2013, California will spend $15.4 billion on prisons and $15.3 billion on education. And these numbers just aren’t pulled out of the air: they’re based on the 9% annual increase in the state’s annual prison budget and the 5% annual increase in the state’s annual educational budget. It’s nice to know where our priorities are.

I only have four classes this year, thus can leave extremely early on certain days. It was on one of these days that the likeness of prison to school became even more apparent.

Me and my friend had left school to go to get some food (neither one of us had 5^th or 7^th periods). We hadn’t snuck out, we hadn’t jumped the fence: we showed our schedules to one of the giant ones, and they had graciously allowed us to pass through the Black Gate Once out of Mordor, we decided, though it was rather far, to visit Rivendell, because they have good burgers there. And so we made our way across the Fields of Pelennor, and were just about to pass Minas Tirith, when a rather loud and angered orc came out of nowhere and detained us.

Okay, I’m going to drop the metaphor now. We were walking along the street, and out of nowhere a policemen rolls down his window, yells at us to stop walking, then pulls a u-turn across the street and drives up on the curb in front of us. Needless to say, we were terrified that we were going to be killed. The cop jumped out of his car, barking and shouting at us, and so, without knowing what else to do, we showed him our schedules (otherwise known as the One Ring). He stopped yelling at us, and let us go on our way, but not before giving us a good lecturing. I wonder what would’ve happened if we hadn’t had our schedules…

I had been thinking of this likeness between school and prison before this incident, and at the time that it happened, I couldn’t even distinguish between the two. I felt like I was in prison, skipping out on parole, dodging the cops in an attempt for freedom. I mean, it actually was the popo, pulling us over, yelling at us, stopping us in our tracks.

When you look at these two institutions, you can’t help but notice that they are not that different. Material things are the most noticeable: guards, gates, policemen, cafeteria, bells, yards, rooms of confinement, terrible food. And then when you look closer, into the abstract and intangible, you notice even more similarities: timed schedules forcing the people to go to certain places at certain times (and if they don’t, there are consequences). Confinement into certain small areas for lengthly amounts of time. A monarchic system where the students and prisoners have practically no voice in what happens to them. Observations of our every movement, and consequences for when we do even the slightest thing wrong (hackey sack, for example). The attempt to mold the prisoners and students into “model citizens”, into atom-atoms that fit nicely and normally into society. The attempt to completely control the actions, habits and personalities of prisoners and students (at school at least, there are strict rules about drugs, alcohol, fighting, clothing, swearing, chewing gum, wearing too much of a certain color, wearing hats, wearing jewelry, wearing revealing clothing, talking loudly, talking quietly, answering questions, addressing other people, reading, writing, sitting, standing, walking, talking and participating).

In some ways, school is worse than prison. Prison is the result of bad choices; prison is punishment. It’s karma, it’s justice. It is the effect of an action. School is automatic: there are no prerequisites. Kids attend school no matter what. School is not the effect of a cause; it happens no matter what you do. Kids have absolutely no choice in the matter. It’s a completely monarchical situation; the people in charge make the decisions, and the people not in charge have to do what the people in charge say no matter what. Moreover, school is worse than prison because the consequences of trying to go against the system (of trying to rebel against the monarchy) are incredibly harsh.

You see, school is all about labeling, putting grades to people’s faces. It’s about generalizing, it’s about indifference to individualism, it’s about putting numbers to people’s identity. When one goes against the system, they get horrible grades. Their value goes down. It doesn’t matter if they are a genius, a leader, a person with revolutionary ideas or incredible talent. The system brings them down, lowers their value in a faceless world of numerical value, and thus completely ruins their future. And when one’s future is ruined, it is blamed on them with the argument “if only you had tried harder” or “if only you had gotten better grades, then you could’ve been someone”. When one tries to go against the dictatorship, they get labeled as a “failure” and are sentenced to living a life with the word “failure” stapled to their forehead.

Going against the prison dictatorship has only two consequences: either more time in prison, or death. Granted, those aren’t exactly the greatest of choices, but one could argue that they are far better than going through life mislabeled.

We live in a society where “labeling”, even though we all do it, is completely frowned upon and everyone is specifically told not to do it. We are told not to judge, not to hold prejudices, not to adhere to stereotypes; yet that is exactly what school does. It gives people, creatures who are so much more complex and deeper than numbers can EVER be, a face value. It tries to rank human beings, to give value to an individual, and then judge that person by that value. Those who get ‘F’s are automatically thought to be idiots, failures, junkies, dopers, losers, misfits and generally useless people: school doesn’t give a second thought to who a person is, because the human soul can’t be translated into a value. There is no measurement for personality, vitality, faith, ideas or love. So the educational system ignores them, and deals only with what it can evaluate: intellect. Memory. To schools, it doesn’t matter who you are, only what you can do in certain intellectual categories the educational system picked based on the society that it is “preparing” it’s students for, even though schools are completely isolated from said society.

Practically the same can be said for prisons. To prison, it doesn’t matter who you are, only what you did. This it is much akin to the way schools treat their students: these are not human beings these institutions are dealing with. They are numbers. Statistics. Little lines and dots of ink on paper.

Both prison and schools are very much like tests, tests to see if these walking statistics can smoothly fit into society. They see the students and prisoners as rats, as guinea pigs, animals to be tested and tried and experimented upon until they come out right and are able to fit in to the world.

The one upside of school is that it is only 8 hours a day. That’s a third of the day, granted, but it means that there are still 16 hours that students can spend outside of school. However, the same people who think schools are doing just fine are also the ones saying that children and teens need at least 9 hours of sleep a night. Which leaves 7 hours of freedom for students. Which is a lot. Or it would be, if school didn’t reach it’s degrading and unjust shadow over our freedom. This shadow is more commonly known as homework, the stuff that, as the years go on, takes up more and more of those 7 free hours. If one adds in transportation, eating, resting, and, oh I don’t know, maybe even having a little fun, one really only has about 4 or 5 hours of freedom. And, by junior year, any one student can have up to 6 hours of homework. Every night.

So we really only have a ridiculously short amount of free time, so short that it is actually more painful than not having freedom at all. We get to only glimpse what the world outside is like before we have to do homework, get ready to go back to school, start an essay. We only get a taste of what the world we are isolated from is like before we have to leave it and return to the place we all love so much.

2:10pm. School is over. For me at least. I don’t have a seventh period, so I get out a slight bit earlier than a lot of other people. So me and a couple of friends start walking towards the other end of school, walking through the practically empty halls. And, of course, we get stopped by a security guard, and after five minutes of trying to explain that we wanted to get to the other side of school (the side closer to Longs Drugs and Yummy Yogurt), he made us exit the school grounds and walk the ridiculously long way around the school. It seemed to me that, since we were technically out of school, he should be able to make an exception and just let us walk the way we were. But then I, once again, it hit me that schools don’t see us as exceptions, as individuals, as people: we are nothing but numbers in their eyes, and will never be anything more than that.