26. School as a contract of adhesion
[From Seth Godin, Stop Stealing Dreams http://www.squidoo.com/stop-stealing-dreams]
Friedrich Kessler, writing in 1943 in the Columbia Law Review, articulated a new kind of contract, one for the industrial age. Rather than being individually negotiated with each party, a contract of adhesion is a take-it-or-leave-it mass deal.
The industrialist says, use this car or this software or this telephone, and merely by using it, you are agreeing to our terms and conditions. With a hat tip to Doc Searls (tk link), here’s what Kessler wrote:
The development of large scale enterprise with its mass production and mass distribution made a new type of contract inevitable—the standardized mass contract. A standardized contract, once its contents have been formulated by a business firm, is used in every bargain dealing with the same product or service. The individuality of the parties which so frequently gave color to the old type of contract has disappeared. The stereotyped contract of today reflects the impersonality of the market.... Once the usefulness of these contracts was discovered and perfected in the transportation, insurance, and banking business, their use spread into all other fields of large scale enterprise, into international as well as national trade, and into labor relations.
School offers the same contract. Every student walking through the doors of the public school is by default entering into a contract of adhesion (and so are her guardians or parents). In Texas, the contract even includes tickets and fines for students as young as ten years old (and if they aren’t paid by the time the student is eighteen, he goes to jail).
Beyond the draconian, barbaric frontier schooling techniques in Texas, though, we see a consistent thread running through most of what goes on in school. The subtext is clear: “Hey, there are a lot of kids in this building. Too many kids, too many things on the agenda. My way or the highway, son.”
Precisely what a foreman would say to a troublesome employee on the assembly line. Not what a patron would say to a talented artist, though.
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