I love the old multi-story brick schools with lots of big windows. They're so beautiful. I think I was lucky enough to not go to any that looked like prisons.

It's cheap to build and maintain. It just gets called "institutional architecture" sometimes.

Some of the schools I went to were architecturally interesting, but you bet there was still a lot of cinderblock, steel and harsh lighting.

Hospitals in my Canadian province often have the same vibe, although they start getting into that communist architecture feeling a bit, too.

South Korean public schools are inviting spaces.

Phillipines too

Ours have a lot of doors for a prison but nowadays they do have them locked from the outside and is kinda creepy relative to when I was a kid. All the students wear their id around their necks.

Is this an American problem most of us are too European to understand

Because it's a building that optimizes people in small rooms in a finite space. Built on a budget that asks for durable plain construction by the lowest bidder. In some cases the same construction firms might very well win contracts to build either.

Why doesn't most office space look like prisons? Office space is general use and can be leased and it's intended to be torn up and modernized every few years.

I think its because both need to house a large amount of individuals in as small a space as acceptable to the outside society. But also, both are ultimately mechanisms of authority that shirk their supposed goals of education and restitution/rehabilitation.

Related, perhaps unpopular opinion: It's outright silly how we expect a good learning environment to come out of putting all of our socially unformed minds into one big facility, with little behavioral supervision (10-to-1, 15-to-1, or worse), and compel them to move from location to location by a bell, and to perform rote memorization in order to meet some metric of success. It's sillier how we expect children to come out of this environment socially well-adjusted, having learned something of value, without psychological trauma, besides the experience of navigating a system of hierarchical authority. You know the wisdom passed down by my liberal (using liberal here in a very strict sense -- NOT necessarily left leaning) Catholic father, who ostensibly would defend the value of educating the public (though, perhaps not the value of public education)?

"Find out what the teacher wants and give it to them."

In EU prisons look like schools. Seriously most prisons here just look like student dormitories. And nothing like movie (aka american) prisons.

They don't everywhere even in the US. Anywhere with a decent public works budget or older building stock won't have that aesthetic.

Today on "things that happen only in the US"...

Any building that has to maintain a high degree of physical security and be built at minimum cost can look like a prison.

Can you be more specific on what reminds you of prisons with your schools? I don't think any of my schools in Germany looked anything like a prison.

Schools look pretty nice in NZ, I think.

I have zero evidence to support this, but it could be government contractors saving money by reusing and slightly modifying building plans between actual prisons and schools? My high school building could definitely have been a prison with some adjustments. Total speculation though.