Ambers Nonconformist Essay

            “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.” Spoken by the great Ralph Waldo Emerson, begs the question who are you, and what do you stand for? In a world of 7 billion and growing, there is only one you, and to give that self-respect up to society would give up everything you are living for. In society there are so many chains pulling you each and every way. Each time pulling a larger piece of you away with it. Do you try hard to look like the people in the magazines? Train hard to be like that athlete in the Olympics? Study more to be like some lawyer who got accepted into Harvard? Life itself comes with a rulebook of guidelines you must follow in order to succeed, but you as an individual need to find that fine line between learning from the rules, and caving into them.

             Being an adolescent your rulebook consists of school until grade 12, ages you must reach until you are aloud to do specific things, and having your choices made for you until you are adult enough to do so. You are always wanting to break the rules, and constantly asking yourself who you are. Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman are all well renowned writers that we learn about in school, and read from in class. They each stand for there own morals, and wrote their own rulebooks to life. The biggest lesson I learned from them is to follow your own road. Don’t let society conform your decisions, and point you in one direction or the other. You are your own person, and you need to follow no other heart but yours.

             School teaches you the same things from day one. Not to cave into peer pressure, don’t be a bully, be your self, and express how you are feeling. But what If schools are doing the exact opposite of this, and in fact are the very source of where all the conformity in society is coming from? One thing about being an individual is that you should have the free will to express your self through your clothing, hair, and or any other look you choose. Most schools though have strict dress clothes that crush the idea of expression. How are you supposed to find your self, and know who you are if you aren’t even aloud to choose what you look like?

             Boarding schools either require uniform, or extremely strict dress codes. Where even on free dress days, or days where the weather calls for something extra to your outfit, you are told how you are aloud to dress, and what you must look like.

Private schools, categorize you as female or male, and then throw you into a sea of students who look exactly the same. Girls wear sweaters with skirts, and penny loafer shoes. Boys wear kakis with polo’s and nice dress shoes. With one change of your outfit you are written up, and ultimately in trouble for trying to be your self. There are constantly limits to who you can be, and once you are finally given the option to dress free like a bird, you feel small and tiny like a mouse and have no confidence to dress for whom you really are. Just like that, school systems have broken one of the many lessons they supposedly teach.

             Apart from dress codes, schools also have a very strict schedule they must follow, and make the children follow as well. Every year you are put into specific classes and subjects that you are required to take if you want to move to the next grade, and ultimately work towards the goal of graduation. If you fail a class, or decide to not take it you will not be able to graduate. There is one simple problem with this. The fact that every student is different, and excel in different subjects, and have different interests in others. As you get older you get to choose maybe two or three of the classes you have to take, but that just simply isn’t enough to decided what you like, or who you want to be. Students should be put into specific classes until they have learned the basics of learning, such as how to read and write, or how to count and so on. Emerson wrote in his essay “ Self-Reliance” that “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind”, and he is right. No one knows you better then your self, especially not a school systems. Your mind knows you best, and knows what you are interested in more then anyone, so what point is there in studying subjects that don’t interest you, and only make you bored and upset? At a certain age bellow eighteen, you should be able to decided what you want to study.

             That brings me to the last lesson that schools teach but don’t follow through on. Experiencing things and learning for our self’s. When in school we reach many mile marks, and learn to grow up in a sense. But with so many strict rules, and consequences if we break them, we never get to learn for our selves. Not getting to choose our classes we don’t get to experience what we like and don’t like. Having the same  schedule for ten plus years, we never get to experience change. No being able to make  choices for our selves until we are seniors in high school… age eighteen, for must of us that gives us three or so months to learn and grow up fast before we must head of to college and be by our selves.