The Geeks Shall Inherit The Earth By Alexandra Robbins And Dead Poets Society

Conformity shapes our everyday decisions, whether it is acknowledged or not. Students supress their true selves out of fear of being ostracized, conforming to the social standard of normal. In The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth By Alexandra Robbins and the movie Dead Poets Society, Both Whitney and Neil face conformity, but they each deal with it differently. This raises the essential question, what are the effects of conformity in high schools? Conformity causes students to develop self esteem issues, due to their belief that their real personality and appearance is lacking and such, changes themselves to fit the standard of normal. In addition, conformity causes students to have a mistaken idea of what social success is. The belief

The effects of conformity serve to eliminate individuality and diversity. In The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth, Whitney is forced to conform to the interests of her friends to uphold the social order at her high school. She does this out of fear of being shunned out of her own group. The effects of Whitney conforming to her friends is shown by her obsession and fixation of her appearance. Before going to school, “Whitney glanced at herself in all of her mirrors for the seventeenth time” (Robbins 178). Whitney’s obsession towards her appearance stems from her self-esteem issues she developed from conforming to the image of a popular girl. The mirrors in this scene are a metaphor to Whitney viewing her fake identity through the mirror. Robbins uses a metaphor of a mirror specifically because it symbolizes the two sides of Whitney, the fake one and the real one. Additionally, one student that was interviewed in the novel says that “I have to be the same as everybody else, or people won’t like me anymore” (Robbins 34). Conformity causes students to believe that their own personality or appearance is not enough and in order to be accepted they have

In Geeks shall inherit the Earth, there is a false idea of what constitutes social success. This mistaken idea is evident in the fact that the students strive to be popular, believing that popularity is what true social success is. Popularity is the opposite of social success, despite what students think. The people that the popular kids in school make fun of are in fact are the ones that are more likely to achieve social success because they do not try to conform and instead embrace diversity and individualism. Even though the popular kids have the “power”, they still do not have social success. Whitney, a popular girl, says that “the prep description didn’t fit the “real” Whitney” (Robbins 31). She feels that the things people think about her aren’t true just because of her clique in school. She goes on even further, saying that if she could’ve chosen a to be part of the punks she would have. This proves the idea further that popularity doesn’t equal social success, and even people who are popular are still unhappy with their social standing in school. Due to the widespread belief that achieving popularity is the same as achieving social success, many students sacrifice their own individuality in hopes of achieving what they believe is social success. This causes a lack of individuality and diversity in high