When Sarah started her first job at a marketing firm, she felt an odd sense of déjà vu during the onboarding process. The employee handbook reminded her of the student planner she’d carried in middle school. The “core values” poster in the break room echoed the character education signs that had lined her elementary school hallways. And when her manager scheduled their first one-on-one, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being called to the principal’s office.
She wasn’t imagining things. For millions of workers, the modern corporation functions as a direct extension of the educational system they left behind, replicating its structures, hierarchies, and social dynamics with remarkable precision. The transition from student to employee often isn’t a transition at all, but rather a continuation of the same institutional experience with a different name badge.
Consider the basic architecture of both environments. In school, students move through a clearly defined hierarchy of grades, each with its own expectations and privileges. In corporations, employees progress through junior, mid-level, and senior positions, often with titles that explicitly denote ranking. Just as a sophomore knows they’re subordinate to a senior, an associate understands their place beneath a vice president. Both systems create vertical stratification where your position in the hierarchy determines your access to resources, your freedom of movement, and your social standing within the institution.
The parallels extend to how time itself is structured and controlled. School trains us to segment our days into discrete periods, to ask permission before using the bathroom, to eat lunch at prescribed times whether we’re hungry or not. The corporate world maintains this regime with remarkable fidelity. We clock in and out, we schedule meetings in neat hour or half-hour blocks, we take our lunch break when the calendar allows. The bell that once signaled the end of third period has been replaced by the Outlook reminder, but the underlying message remains identical: your time is not your own to structure.
Performance evaluation follows the same template in both institutions. Students receive report cards at regular intervals, with grades that purport to objectively measure their worth and potential. Employees get performance reviews on similar cycles, complete with numerical ratings and comments that echo the language of progress reports. Both systems claim to assess merit, but both often measure compliance, agreeability, and the ability to navigate institutional expectations as much as they measure actual competence or achievement.
The social dynamics translate with eerie precision as well. Every office has its equivalent of the popular kids, the outcasts, the teacher’s pets. There are unwritten rules about where to sit in meetings, who gets invited to which social gatherings, and how to signal your membership in various informal coalitions. The lunchroom politics of adolescence simply migrate to the office kitchen, where the same territorial anxieties and status competitions play out over coffee pods and refrigerator space.
Even the architecture of the two environments speaks to their shared purpose. Open-plan offices, like open classrooms, create an environment of constant surveillance and exposure. The cubicle farm replicates the grid of desks in a traditional classroom, each worker visible and accountable, their productivity subject to continuous monitoring. Corner offices and private spaces are reserved for those highest in the hierarchy, just as teachers and administrators get their own rooms while students share communal space.
The educational system, particularly in its modern form, exists largely to prepare people for corporate employment. It teaches punctuality, deference to authority, the ability to sit still for extended periods, and the capacity to perform tasks that may feel meaningless without complaint. These aren’t incidental features but core functions. School socializes us into accepting institutional logic, where abstract rules matter more than individual circumstances, where standardization trumps personalization, and where questioning the system itself is seen as disruptive rather than thoughtful.
This continuity helps explain why so many people experience a profound sense of stasis in their careers, even as they advance. They’re still waiting for permission, still seeking approval, still feeling that their worth is determined by how well they perform for an authority figure. The manager becomes the teacher, the performance review becomes the report card, the promotion becomes the honor roll. We’ve simply swapped one set of institutional vocabulary for another while maintaining the same underlying power dynamics.
For some people, this continuity feels comfortable. The predictability of institutional life, its clear hierarchies and explicit expectations, can be reassuring. If you learned to navigate the school system successfully, you already possess the skills needed to navigate the corporate world. You know how to read unwritten rules, how to manage up, how to appear engaged during mandatory assemblies masquerading as all-hands meetings.
But for others, this realization arrives as a profound disappointment. They imagined that graduation represented a threshold into a different kind of existence, one characterized by autonomy, self-direction, and adult agency. Instead, they discover that they’ve merely transferred from one supervised institution to another, trading a backpack for a briefcase but maintaining the same fundamental relationship to authority and time.
The corporation-as-school model also helps explain why so many workplace conflicts resemble adolescent drama rather than professional disagreements. When institutions treat adults like students, adults often respond by acting like students. They form cliques, they gossip, they compete for the attention and approval of authority figures. They internalize the metrics by which they’re judged, allowing external evaluation to colonize their sense of self-worth. The honor student becomes the high performer, carrying the same anxieties about maintaining their standing and the same fear of falling behind.
This institutional continuity also shapes how we think about alternatives to traditional employment. People who leave corporate jobs to freelance or start their own ventures often describe the experience in terms of finally leaving school. They talk about the disorientation of having no bell schedule, no one to grant them permission, no authority figure to validate their choices. Some thrive in this environment, but others founder, discovering that twelve to sixteen years of institutional conditioning hasn’t prepared them for self-directed work.
The pandemic briefly disrupted this parallel, forcing both schools and corporations to reckon with remote work and distributed learning. For a moment, it seemed possible that both institutions might evolve beyond their traditional forms. But the fierce pushback against remote work, the insistence on return-to-office mandates, and the rush to restore “normalcy” suggests how deeply invested both institutions are in maintaining their shared model of surveillance, hierarchy, and control.
Understanding corporations as extensions of the school system isn’t just an academic observation. It’s a lens that can help workers understand why certain workplace dynamics feel so familiar, why certain conflicts feel so emotionally charged, and why the promise of professional adulthood often feels unfulfilled. We’re not failing to grow up. We’re succeeding at navigating institutions that never wanted us to.