School Domination

School is an institution that is very dominant in every child’s life. Kids spend the better part of their lives in school and doing school related activities. But in reality people are never really free of the lessons and attributes of school. School teaches kids to become mindless and obedient workers and that is very important in our society. Emerson once said that in our society “the virtue in most request is conformity”. This can be seen as one of the main underlying lessons schools teach. Schools may boast about how they teach kids to become free and critical thinkers who will be able to think for them selves and become their own self. In reality as these words are spoken, their actions are a completely different matter. Schools have methods in which kids are taught to not think for themselves but to be dependent on the teacher figure to relay information on to them and to be plots waiting to be cultivated. Schools create a façade in which students are brought into a false sense of security where it more easily hides the underlying theme of creating perfect robots to be controlled. The students never know it because they are more then happy to believe the mask the school has put up then to change their role and break out. 

Maybe in some ways this is what the school wishes to succeed in, to have students not care to break out of something that is ultimately taking away their right to be independent. During some research John Gatto (winner of the New York City teacher award) figured out this math about how much time his students actually have to be themselves:

·      Out of 168 hours in each week my children sleep 56. That leaves them 112 hours a week out of which to fashion a self.

·      My children watch 55 hours of television a week according to recent reports. That leaves them 57 hours a week in which to grow up.

·      My children attend school 30 hours a week, use about 6 hours getting ready, going and coming home, and spend an average of 7 hours a week in homework, a total of 45 hours.

 

During that time they are under constant surveillance, have no private time or private space, and are disciplined if they try to assert individuality in the use of time or space. That leaves 12 hours a week out of which to create a unique consciousness. Of course, my kids eat, and that takes some time–not much because they’ve lost the tradition of family dining, but if we allow 3 hours a week to evening meals we arrive at a net amount of private time for each child of 9 hours. (Teacher of the Year Acceptance Speech)

It is ridiculous that after conducting this research he came to the conclusion students only have 12 hours to create our selves a week. From a young age we are brought into these pens which confine us and are never really free until after 13 years of our lives to then only be put into more box's where we lose the right to be individuals and are rewarded to be more like robots following the same pattern. Gatto even says, "The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders." This is true. For all the years in school, students are taught to listen to teachers and to obey orders. Often in schools there are bells to signify when a class is over and to stop work, there are hand gestures and songs when teachers want us to be quiet. We are being taught to follow specific patterns like when people train their dogs and like dogs we will carry these lessons with us for the rest of our lives, bells will always signify that something is over and something new should be worked on. This is what they want to prepare us for. In society it is much easier to work with people who are already familiar with following orders and to not question or speak out.

America, our nation is supposed to fulfill dreams and to be a beacon of freedom. Now for the younger generations it is only a machine to better shape us into "model" citizens so they can work us until we grow old and retire or die. Real life lessons and adventures only exist in dreams or pages of books, no longer are children "allowed" to run free and discover new things, instead they sit confined for 6 hours a day in cells being taught to obey and get rid of their independence. Students are only given information, which they must commit to memory and then recite later on, never grasping the full picture of anything. Keeping the ideology that we are indeed ignorant and that we need the teacher to educate us and pass their knowledge onto us is a trap where we do not see the power in ourselves to be something more, to actually learn more then what we are being taught and actually obtain something meaningful in our bleak lives. There is also the connection between the humanist and the way SOF deals with educating kids. Though often times at most I see both ways of teaching. In most cases there is no strict boundaries between teacher and student, one is no more knowledgeable then the other. Though as much in any case there is the sign of clear respect and role of teacher pupil. But nothing along the lines where the students are completely ignorant and the teacher is the savior who will teach them everything they need. Though in classes like math and science I often see the narrative way where we merely sit there and they deposit information into our brains to store and catalog for later.

John Freire wrote in his book that "the more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them." Students not only do not do anything about the fact that they have little room to be free to be themselves, they allow it to be done when every day a bit of their individuality is taken from them. This causes us to be the oppressed where the oppressors do not wish to see the world transformed or revealed to the students so they use education to keep these from us. This is because schools have made them quite adapt. Instead of breaking free and changing how things are, the students will merely adapt and change themselves to how the world is.

 Even when students are finally allowed to return home or set free for the day, most children will run to the TV and watch shows for hours until their parents yell at them or they spend hours on home work. No one is allowed any free time. Weekends are merely facades where children wont complain about going to school every day with no breaks even though sometimes weekends are only spent on homework and school related activities. Though everyone can try to escape from the chains and cages, which entrap us, it is ultimately impossible to be completely free. There will always be cases in which the school’s teachings will find its way back to you, either through your own actions since is has been drilled into you or through another source. In the movie the Dead Poet’s Society, there was a teacher who tried to break his students out of their roles of obedient students and to open their eyes to the world around them. The teacher did many unconventional activities such as ripping pages out of textbooks, standing on the teacher’s desk and writing and reading poetry aloud for everyone to hear. The lessons he hoped to confer to his students were for them to strive to find their own voice and to look at things in different ways. Though while he was teaching them these ideas on transcendentalism, the school was the very opposite. They imposed and were strict about rules and following them. The school and the boy’s parents were the oppressor’s, oppressing on them their views on life and how things should be done. So many things were expected of the students and they never knew anything else but to follow along with what they were told. This all changed as they began to understand the lessons their new teacher was teaching them. One boy even disobeyed his father and went to act in a play. He took up his own interests and dreams in life and made them real. He created his own identity separate from what his parents and the school created. Although at the end he forsakes his identity and allowed his father to put chains on him. Though he did take matters into his own hands and killed himself as a way to escape. But couldn’t there have been other ways for him to be his own person, besides giving up and killing himself? Is that the fate that awaits all of us? Is there no hope to find a resolution? Is there only to swim with the stream and to make the best out of what you got, instead of trying to create something new?

There is no clear solution to being free of school’s oppression and domination. Though I do not see that many students will take the same road the kid in the Dead Poet’s Society did and kill themselves. Although in all likelihood, the students now are hardly aware of what is happening to them. But is it better to not know of what’s going on if there is no hope of escape? Won’t we be saving countless disappointments of hope when students find it is much harder to create a separate mind outside of what society wants of them? Maybe students have already discovered this fact and so have decided to “bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion.” (Emerson) School teaches students to adapt themselves to the ever presence and facts of life. Students will forever be constantly struggling with creating identities while trying to keep their identity separate from those around them. Conformity is the key concept every school wishes to imprint on their students. The schools do such a great job of it that because students have no separate identity outside of “student” it is easier to confer information and not be troubled about the importance of the facts of its meaning because the kids will not even dig any farther then what is given to them.