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opinion, and that is all due to the fact that we should not disobey the rules. We are afraid to speak up because we are afraid of what others might have to say about us. Another aspect that might keep us from speaking up is the fear of being wrong, and embarrassing ourselves in front of our classmates. The American education system is very much designed to shape and outline the way an individual should act in society in order to be prepared for the world outside of school. In classrooms a student must raise his or her hand in order to speak and this is most likely to be followed by each student if one student does it. It is called conformity, in order to be accepted you must also do what is required and right.
Another aspect that has a lot to do with the shaping of conformity is our friends. Friends are everywhere they are, in school they are at home, at work, etc., and we are always looking to conform to them, in order to fit in. As a kid, in school, what matters the most is what friend have to say because they are the ones that we are interested in pleasing, in order to become part of their group of friends. We come to be the people that we are because of our friend. If our group of friend dresses a certain way, we do it to, if they go to certain places to eat, we go to the same places as well, and it is all because we want to fit in, we want to conform to them. As little kids in elementary, if our friend said, “yuck” to boys or girls, we would also say “yuck” and that is because we don’t want to become the black sheep of the herd, we also want to say “yuck”. Like David Brooks, the author of “The Organization Kid” said,
… but my impression is that the big-backpack era began in the mid-1980’s. Kids began carrying larger and larger backpacks to school every year; by the early 1990’s I saw elementary school students lugging storage containers that were bigger than they were (367).
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This quote is an example of how kids learn to conform from fellow students, if a couple of students carry big backpacks to school the others will want to do the same because it becomes the “cool” thing to do.
From personal experience I have learned that friends have a lot to do with the way a person is or acts in school and that is because I also conformed to my friends in high school. If my friends dressed a certain way I also dressed with the same style. There are also cases in which kid, specially teenagers are willing to get into drugs because of the peer- pressure that they are receiving from friends. If an adolescent really wants to be part of a group of friends and it takes trying drugs in order to belong to the group, they will most likely do so. Friends can be good models as well as bad, and conforming to them can lead to both, good or bad. It is ultimately up to the person to decide what is best for them, but being a teenager is not an easy thing because you have to try hard to belong to a group and to be “cool”, because no teen wants to be recognized as a “nerd” or “geek”. Like Solomon E. Asch, author of “Opinions and Social Pressure” said, “All social sciences take their departure from observations of the profound effects that groups exert on their members” (309). This quote is a great explanation of how adolescents as well as teenagers observe and take in the information given by their friends and they follow them.
Another person might say that schools and friends are not major producers of conformity. People might believe that schools are programmed to teach students needed material and to guide them through it. Unlike me, others might actually believe that schools teach self-sufficiency and that they also teach students to be individuals that
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stand up for their beliefs. School might just be a small boost to shaping kids to become independent and to learn how to act, but there is no way that school can fully promote
conformity, a child will conform to what they want and not to what the school and teachers tell them to conform to. Schools are teaching children important material that will help them get through school and life, but they have to learn to become their own individual, and they have to learn how to act in certain situations. It is an innate rule that we all have; we do not have to learn to conform to others or to society.
People might believe that we act the way we do and we dress the way we do because we want to and that friends have little to with it. Friends can be influences but ultimately a person makes his or her own decisions and does not conform to friends. A group of friend cannot possibly peer- pressure someone to take drugs; the kid makes his/her own decision to do so; friends have nothing to do with the decision the kid makes. Adolescents do not care if they are not part of a “cool” group they will simply go on with their lives. Many teens do not care about being like their friends they want to be their own individual person, regardless of what others say or what they look like. Friends have no say in a friends decisions or lives, peer-pressure is sole-pressure. A person will do what is best for their persona.
In conclusion, schools and friends are both, big roads to conformity. Schools teach children to conform to society and to other since a very young age, and friends, whether they mean to or not make other want to conform to their style and to their attitude. Many people might not believe that schools and friends can have such major impacts on conformity, but the reality is that they do and that we have all gone through
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the same routine of learning how to conform to others as well as to society. We learn how to act in different situations and we learn this since a young age because it later become
a custom, and schools are great teachers of this form of conformity. Friends, especially in high school are our shapers of conformity because we learn to conform to their style in order to fit in with the group. Besides various other aspects that shape conformity, school and friends are the most common and noticeable.
Works Cited
1. Brooks, David. “The Organization Kid”. Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. 8th ed. Eds. Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. New York: Longman, 2002. 365-375
2. Asch, Solomon E. “Opinions and Social Pressure”. Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. 8th ed. Eds. Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. New York: Longman, 2002. 309-515.
School and Friends,
The Shapers of Conformity
Nancy Gamboa
Do you agree that the American education system is designed to shape conformity in its students, and that friends also play a big role in shaping conformity?
Three Questions
I think that the strengths of my paper are my arguments and that the weakness of my paper is the question, in the way that it is phrased. Other than that I believe I did well last quarter I would have said that my refutations were very weak because I did not understand the concept of the counter argument, but this time I believe I did well. The overall process of the writing the paper was not do bad once I actually knew what I was going to write about, but digging to find what to write about was much tougher. I think that it is much harder to write an essay when you have to create the question. I selected the topic I wrote about because I truly believe it and I found it easier to find arguments for something that I believe than for something that I do not believe is true. The most challenging part would be shaping the question and actually going step by step to defend each argument.
