Do modern schools suffocate individuality?
Parents take aim at rules and routine.
Originally published in the Moultrie News.
If modern schooling was shaped during the industrial revolution to produce compliant workers — borrowing from the Prussian model with desks, bells, schedules, hand raised for permission, uniformity over expression, and obedience over creativity — why are we still educating children like this at the cost of their individuality?
There are real problems with today’s educational system, some of which do trace back to decisions made long ago. But it’s unfair to say modern schooling’s sole purpose was to produce compliant factory workers. Public schools were created to educate: to instill literacy and knowledge, prepare students for civic life, and accomplish collectively what parents struggled to do individually.
Early systems did emphasize discipline and routine — not to make factory workers, but to maintain order among large groups of children. Without rules, there is no order. Without order, kids don’t learn. Even the most gifted educators rely on such structures to make learning possible.
This doesn’t dismiss your larger concern. You fear education is sapping your child’s individuality. You think lines, schedules, and dress codes impose conformity that undermines the student’s creativity.
It’s worth noting that practically every creative, individualistic person you know passed through this same system. If education’s purpose is to turn us into industrial clones, it has failed.
That shouldn’t surprise us. Thought, after all, is always free. Also, every afternoon, kids break their meager shackles. The hand raisings are over. They go home and read books, play sports, build models — whatever they like.
Well, they used to. Today, they rush home to scroll social media or play video games. Leave them home alone for a day, and it’s doubtful you’ll return to find them producing a neighborhood play. You’ll more likely find them still in their pajamas, gazing at a screen.
Know your villains. With its addictive, tranquilizing algorithms, it is the screen — not the school — that produces the mind-numbing qualities you fear.
Hence, the most damaging “innovation” in public education isn’t the desk: it’s the Chromebook. Observe today’s classrooms, and you’re apt to see kids tethered to their devices. Though instructors can recite a convincing script as to why this qualifies as a first-rate education, it’s far closer to an experiment in domestication.
So, if modern education eventually produces the personality-draining conformity you speak of, it won’t be due to bells and schedules, but rather salesmanship by Silicon Valley.
Targeting rules and routines as the enemy is misguided in another way: far from being suffocators, they actually foster children’s individuality.
Take dress codes. Many assume unrestricted dress encourages “self-expression.” Maybe, but clothes are among the most superficial forms of expression imaginable. It’s the inside of the book that reveals an author’s personality — not the cover.
Unrestricted dress corrals kids into shallow categories: “You like the Chiefs? Me, too. Let’s talk football.”
With a stricter code, like uniforms, finding a friend who likes the Chiefs means actually speaking to people, listening to them, and observing their behavior. Through that process, kids are exposed to new interests.
Thus, the more restrictive system creates the better outcome. Slouching toward surface-level interests doesn’t stimulate individuality. You have to dig deeper, diversify your experiences and relate to people different from you.
In this way, lack of organization inhibits individuality, while structure draws it out. Language — a rules-based communication system — doesn’t prevent us from expressing ourselves. It makes expression possible. Without it, we would be babbling savages, like a classroom where every child talks at once.
Have road rules kept us from getting where we want to go? Have moral codes stopped innovation? Our creativity supplies unique images, but boundaries provide the canvas.
Did Shakespeare lose his individuality because he wrote in iambic pentameter? Did Beethoven shed his creativity because he composed in symphonic form? Did learning the fundamentals of painting prevent Dalí and Picasso from expressing themselves?
More to the point, would these great artists have failed to become great if they had to raise their hands or travel to lunch single file? No, and neither has it impeded ordinary people like us.
Beware of scarecrows, parents. The gravest threat to your child’s individuality is carried in his pocket. And his strongest allies are the habits and institutions that guide him to thrive within structure — so that real freedom, when it comes, can function in form and still be free.
Jody Stallings has been an award-winning teacher in Charleston since 1992 and is director of the Charleston Teacher Alliance. To submit a question, order his books, or follow him on social media, please visit JodyStallings.com.