Essay On Conformity Of Education

America is a country built on freedom, growth, and opportunity. Throughout years of history, we as a nation have defied the odds and created a unified strength, destined for greatness. However, as the future unfolds, the power we possess is the hands of the select few—the wealthy elite. Our successes are based on who and what we are born into. From the moment we enter this world, to the education we receive, and the employment we spend our lives performing, is confined and conformed to the rulers America was founded upon. It becomes the risk to question these inherited places and challenge what is considered “normality” that ultimately creates our freedom and creates our own individual ideologies. Our birth is believed to define who we are.

Paulo Freire believes, “Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the practice of freedom— the means by which men and women discover ow to participate in the transformation of their world.” In this way, education is viewed in two ways: a process by which people arrive at a capacity to use their skills and talents; or, a process that prepares people to fit into their position in society. While the second one is always to occur in education, the first one is more creative and free willing, essentially being the want of every person. To perform a job in the best way possible, an individual must have the capacity of talents to succeed at this. Education in the first view leads us to freedom of creativity and opens our mind to one day be professionals in employment. But our society is straying from this view and only teaching with the second view in mind. Curriculums in schools are leaving aspects of our country’s history that teaches the importance of freedom, as well as the idea that we can do wrong and should learn from them in order to grow. Classrooms no longer discuss the harsh ideas of slavery in the South, or that Columbus seized Indian territories through cruelty and violence. They place these scenarios in lighting of black freedom and a hero who founded

We begin to fall under the ideology of the employer, a “strict chain of command and close surveillance, leaving behind our freedom”. We become obedient. As the power is the hands of a selection few, we are trained to obey the laws created by them. Our brain slowly strays from our own identity and begins to act and do as the power would like us to. As Stockholm’s syndrome suggest, it becomes safer to conform to the power holder for the chance to survive. However, this obedience can become destructive not only to the individual, but to the world around us. It leads to war, poverty, and destruction of the environment. Stanley Milgram writes:
The most fundamental lesson of our study is that ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover; even the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources to resist