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.