Word: conformists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...there. As each of FM’s fifteen seniors arrived to our tastefully blocked-off corner of the restaurant, there were air kisses and sophisticated-sounding greetings. Everyone was really well-dressed, except maybe Andrew D. “Tad” Warshall, who looked sportingly non-conformist with a tuxedo jacket, open shirt and scraggly head of hair topped with baseball cap. People drifted in, sat down, sipped water and made conversation while we all waited for dinner to start...
...those in your section to bail out and suffer the dreaded “five-point deduction from your final section grade.” And if that Grinchy grad student hadn’t decided that no, Marx wasn’t a “flag-toting conformist in disguise”—however amusing it was as you finished your midterm paper at sunrise—you could afford to tell him or her what to do with that five points...
...tradition. In the early years of this country, most children were educated at home, either by parents or tutors. Public education started in the middle of the 19th century. When, in the 1960s, a leftist education reformer named John Holt began pushing home schooling as an alternative to conformist public schools, his ideas were seen as fringe. Home schooling was illegal in many states until the 1980s and '90s, when well-organized evangelical Christians adopted home schooling as a way to escape what they saw as the creeping disorder of the campus...
...result, predictably, is the warped culture that holds sway in the halls of most American high schools. Adolescents are conformist, so the culture demands conformity. Adolescents are vicious, so the culture is cruel beyond belief. Adolescents are insecure and anti-intellectual, so the culture despises academic achievement. And, of course, adolescents (or their parents, more likely) adore athletics, and so the culture treats athletic stars and their paramours as its kings and queens...
When a student finally graduates out of this culture, he has undoubtedly gained a smattering of practical knowledge. But after four years in a shallow, conformist world, he is no closer to being an adult, really, than when he entered high school in the first place. Or if he has matured, than it has been in spite of his "socialization," not because...