Duct Tape the Child’s Mouth
Educating kids that their voices don’t matter
With such a collaborative learning style in today’s schools, you might as well send your child off to school with duct tape over their mouths. Collaborative and group work has taken the classroom over in recent years and cut teachers workloads down while putting stress on the students. Instead of a professor or teacher needing to grade 25 different research papers or lab reports, they divide the class into five groups of five, thus cutting their grading down 20 papers. While this may be way more efficient for them, it’s taking away the student’s ability to be an individual and doing nothing but add stress and worry into their lives. Opinions are not welcome and their own voice is squashed in the classroom.
Where’s My Voice?
Remember that one kid that talked loud and took control over the whole class when the teacher wasn’t around? The one kid that you dreaded being put in a group with? For those few students with overbearing and outgoing personalities group projects are basically individual projects where they get to boss everyone around, tell them what to write, and not have to do any actual work. For the rest of us, the majority of us, our voices get squashed by the outgoing and overbearing project leader. Teachers and Professors that stick students into random groups for projects are making the idea of an individual’s voice to disappear. No longer are the students willing to talk in front of the class for fear their ideas will be refuted and that idea of rejection and failure in a way is devastating to younger students. With continued exposure they become reliant on the bully group member to come up with an opinion that they can write about.
What is an Opinion?
“You can try to change the definition by throwing in your own two cents, but the community…. decides in the end,” (Poe 359)
Kids are so worried about fitting in and conforming to society’s definition of normality that they are afraid to speak out or have an idea that their classmates disagree with. We shy away from conflict and debate and we fall into a conformist mold to stay accepted in social groups. In group projects, if someone in the group disagrees with what the rest of the group thinks they feel they can’t voice their opinion. They don’t want to cause conflict or break the mold so they decide to keep their mouth shut to keep the peace. Conformity results from the pressure of consensus in society as described by Marshall Poe in his article “The Hive” while he discusses the collaborative efforts of Wikipedia. While the idea of combining mind power seems like a good idea, it does more damage than good. Ultimately the entire community (groups in this case) decides what something means or what is right and what is wrong and kids are learning that their opinion does not matter.
Why is Conformity So Bad?
“Our problem today is that we are threatened with an excess of conformity. Our problem is to foster diversity, and the alternative voucher scheme would do this far more effectively than a nationalized school system,” (Pilette).
I apologize to economist Milton Freidman who Pillette references in her article above but this is not a problem at all today. Every single day I’ve spent in school I have felt a pressure to conform and keep my mouth shut. We do not “foster diversity” in any way even without a nationalized school system. Children are taught to respect their elders and see teachers as authority figures so they become an army of identical students who do everything they are told and it eliminates diversity in the classroom. Teachers love the absence of conflict and don’t encourage individuality or provide opportunities for students to voice their own opinions. Rigorous debates are no longer part of the curriculum and even class discussions are falling apart for fear an idea will be rejected. Our education systems are doing nothing but teaching kids to be the same as their peers and that no matter how brilliant they are for they will be considered abnormal and looked down upon.
Works Cited:
Poe, Marshall. The Hive. 2013. Emerging: Contemporary Readings for Writers. By Barclay Barrios. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins, 2010. 349–61. Print.
Vesely Pillete, Anna. “”An Excess of Conformity’ in Public Education.” The Brattleboro Reformer Mar 24 2011. ProQuest. Web. 14 Apr. 2015 . Internet. Available from: http://search.proquest.com/docview/858275052?accountid=12756
Picture Credits:
https://byhisdesign5.wordpress.com/2012/02/25/signs-of-spring/
https://redbooth.com/blog/5-collaboration-lessons-from-partnerships-gone-terribly-wrong
http://blog.primohealthcoach.com/bid/91977/Finding-Your-Optimal-Nutritional-Needs
http://izquotes.com/quote/324564
