Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 6, 1992 TAG: 9203060460
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BRAD D. MORTENSEN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Both started as tools to assist society to grow. What they have done is force society into the mold in which the powerful wish it to remain.
What is the goal of education? Knowledge? Enrichment? Teaching important facts?
Today's public schools do little more than teach children to conform. Sit quietly at your desk. Raise your hand for permission to talk. Follow the rules of the classroom, to the letter, or be labeled a "discipline problem" and face harsh methods for the breaking of unique personality.
What did you learn in public school? Maybe not much in the way of personally enriching knowledge, but you did learn how to behave in a classroom setting.
College professors have to reteach students to think for themselves. Isn't that something we should already know? Public education brainwashes us to think like everyone else. We learn to conform - even if this destroys our innate individual creativity.
Students have to relearn the skills involved in using our imaginations. College helps some, but the vast majority of American citizens never attend college, and college cannot cure all of what 12 years of public school has ingrained in our psyches.
Most little kids are said to have "a good imagination." What happens to this seemingly natural outlet for personal creativity? It is repressed for the sake of order and expediency when it comes to public situations, most importantly including public school.
You are forced to learn how to act in public by socialization processes such as school, church, home and just being in public with an authority figure (like a parent). You are punished in numerous ways mentally, socially and even physically if you don't always act in the accepted ways.
Think of a child talking and singing in a store. She or he is told to keep quiet, to receive a reward or to avoid a punishment. What is that child hurting? She or he is embarrassing a parent in public, that's all. Is this a crime?
If the parent were not oversocialized to act in a specific way for each specific setting, maybe the parent and child could have a meaningful, semi-intelligent exchange. Wouldn't this benefit both the parent and child?
What we have in Western society today is a blind faith in procedure, uniformity and social order.
In the Soviet Union, several generations were brought up to be obedient parts of society, working only for the good of the whole. After 72 years of sacrificing the "I" for the "we," the Soviet system collapsed. It lacked thinkers and leaders. The few that existed were exiled or trapped in the Communist machine.
America is more subtly breeding non-thinking conformity. You learn to sit still in class and pay attention; don't daydream or let your mind wander to things the system feels are unimportant.
Where do today's leaders come from? The ultra-successful break all the rules. They leave behind overpoliteness and political correctness and they lead, not follow.
As American children, we learn almost everything about how to act through school and television. We get our news from CNN, our fashion and musical tastes from MTV, our entertainment from the television networks; all through that 19-inch glass screen.
What have we learned? Do television and education reflect society - or does society reflect television and education?
All too often, it is the latter. We need to teach American youth to think for themselves, to be their own people, to act as they feel. Constraining them with a forced social order hurts society in the long run, although in the short run it seems to make things run smoother.
Education is set up in assembly-line fashion. You sit in a straight row for a year and listen to a teacher teach the same thing he or she did the year before: same lessons, same tests, same results. You then move on to the next grade.
Some kids get A's, some get D's. Why do some of the most intelligent people fare poorly in school and on standardized tests? Teachers, educated through the same process, lose the creativity to expand young minds. Socialization continues from preschool until the student gives up school.
Children are educated and socialized to sit in front of their televisions. Television brings "the world into your living room," right?
Wrong. Television brings a two-dimensional, neatly packaged, and sanitized version of the world into your living room. It perpetuates itself. It is not reality; it, like education, represents another person's view of reality.
Get out and see the world for yourself. Live, love, learn, grow. Human beings have the ability to think and reason for themselves. Don't let teachers, television and society do the thinking for you.
Brad D. Mortensen is a senior majoring in political science at Radford University.
by CNB