Individuality In High School Essay

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You have had a long day at work and it’s your birthday. No one has remembered and you have received no gifts. Walking into your home, you see a box of cake mix left out in case you decided to celebrate. Throwing your troubles away, you decide to make yourself a cake if no one else will. Forget the directions, you’re a competent, efficient person and you do not need to take direction from anything. All the ingredients you can remember that are needed for the mix are added and after waiting what you believe is a decent amount of time, you’re ready to have your birthday cake. However, something is wrong. The outside looks discolored, the shape is flat, and the mixture is watery. What has happened? You knew what went in a cake, what order, how …show more content…

Depression sets in and you leave the room hoping not to bear another minute of this miserable day. Within the American school system, the goals to help students gain personal fulfillment and help create good citizens are contradictory. One cannot think for themselves and pursue personal interests while being socialized to fit into society, it is an oxymoron and it is a belief of nation. Truly, school systems need to understand that while individuality is an important factor in self-growth, some conformity is necessary for societies to function. As said by Neil Postman, “You cannot have a democratic-indeed civilized- community life unless people have learned how to participate in a disciplined way as part of a group.” While it is the individuals that learn, conformity, having a negative connotation of being suppressed, is truly the principle that allows students to learn how to behave is the system deemed right or wrong in their society. If individualism was indeed the sole principle of school systems, there would be no expectations now order such as the expectation in source G “respect the rights of others to learn”. While there may be those who do not believe in the current social system of school, “George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be

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