Here, we propose a moral and totalising critique of the modern school very different from the hegemonic focus on the calculation of the relative advantages and disadvantages and performance gaps. Using a Foucauldian critique that questions the school as an institution of normalisation and its effects, we ask whether the school is a solution to the problem of education or rather a constant and ineluctable source of educational problems. We address six dimensions of the school episteme (its self-evidence, the production of boundaries and binaries, the construction of the universal and norm(ality), the naturalisation of inequalities, the construction of modern individualisation, and the new role of the professional agents of socialisation) and conclude that we are not ‘for’ school but ‘against’ it. We will rehearse its ‘moral and spiritual desolation’ and argue that the school is intolerable and irredeemable and irreparable. We propose an exercise of refusal rather than criticism. Thus, here and in the next three chapters, we propose to unthink school and explore some other educations and other possibilities for social relations of learning.