Too Much Conformity — Or Not Enough?

Starting sometime around the middle of the twentieth century, American society has been bombarded with comments demanding less conformity. Certainly, it is possible that a society can be too conformist. Not only is it possible, but world history offers concrete examples of cookie-cutter behavior being imposed on individuals on a mass scale.

Whether any given society is too conformist, as opposed being merely somewhat conformist, is of course to a certain extent a matter of opinion.

Less subjective is the task of identifying and quantifying the specific results and effects of both conformity and nonconformity.

Since the horrifying killings at Columbine High School in 1999, examination of social dynamics in high schools has taken on a certain urgency. What can we learn about the individuals and the motives which lie behind such killings? Can we detect social factors proactively to prevent such crimes?

Columbine was not the first high school killing spree, but it seems to have captured the attention of the mass media and the imagination of the public more than any of the previous incidents.

Efforts have been made to mine high school students for their awareness of potential warning signs that such violence may be in the offing: Students are urged to report potential perpetrators. Signs and posters tell students, “If You See Something, Say Something.” Similar slogans remind students that “It’s OK to Say” if they know of some inclination toward mass violence, and other posters tell students to “See It. Report It. Stop It!”

Such well-intentioned encouragements have not succeeded in reducing violent sprees.

These efforts to encourage students to report potential perpetrators are swimming against the current. For three-quarters of a century, a coordinated effort has been underway to make American society in general, and high schools in particular, less conformist. This effort has been by some metrics — by many metrics? — successful.

In an environment shaped by nonconformism and anti-conformism, it is difficult to persuade students to identify among their peers those who might be likely to plan mass violence.

In hindsight, many of the perpetrators of large-scale school violence were identifiable. But students have been conditioned to ignore or overlook nonconformity. Students have been conditioned not even to perceive bizarre appearances or behaviors.

Historians and sociologists can debate whether or not American society was too conformist in the 1940s and 1950s. It is ultimately a question of opinion.

At the beginning of the second quarter of the twenty-first century, however, there are measurable and observable effects arising from a steady barrage of nonconformist and anti-conformist messages.

Americans in general, and American high school students in particular, have been taught or persuaded not to notice what can only be described as weird: strange actions, speech, or appearances. Some might even consider it uncomfortable or inappropriate to be aware of another’s oddity.

Society has compromised the safety of high school students in the name of rebelling against conformism. Certainly, it is a democratic instinct to protect an individual’s right to express herself or himself. But it is also a democratic instinct to protect the population at large; doing so entails an effort to identify potential threats — those whose words and behaviors mark them as outliers.

The Other Kind of Gender Equity: Why Are Men Not Thriving at Universities?

The evidence is conclusive: At colleges and universities in the United States, fewer boys than girls are applying for admission, being accepted for admission, matriculating, or graduating. In all of those activities, girls form a clear and growing majority. Among the boys who do matriculate, average grades are lower.

This trend is increasing.

In 2021, Douglas Belkin wrote:

In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man, if the trend continues, said Douglas Shapiro, executive director of the research center at the National Student Clearinghouse.

Belkin described the situation in that year:

No reversal is in sight. Women increased their lead over men in college applications for the 2021-22 school year — 3,805,978 to 2,815,810 — by nearly a percentage point compared with the previous academic year, according to Common Application, a nonprofit that transmits applications to more than 900 schools. Women make up 49% of the college-age population in the U.S., according to the Census Bureau.

Since then, the trend has indeed continued. In 2024, the gender gap is larger than it was in 2021.

The statistical skew cuts across all the usual demographic variables: religion, income level, race, ethnicity, etc. The gender gap exists in a wide range of institutions: community colleges, four-year colleges, large universities.

Already in 2021, the female enrollment majority was nearly two-thirds of the student body, as Belkin writes:

The gender enrollment disparity among nonprofit colleges is widest at private four-year schools, where the proportion of women during the 2020-21 school year grew to an average of 61%, a record high, Clearinghouse data show. Some of the schools extend offers to a higher percentage of male applicants, trying to get a closer balance of men and women.

Some universities have made intentional efforts to recruit more boys and to lower admission standards slightly for boys. Despite such initiatives, the gender gap continues to increase. In 2024, the skew had indeed crossed the two-thirds mark on some campuses.

What’s to be done?

The causes of this inequity are several, and so the repair will involve more than one action. Social and cultural attitudes about masculinity will need to change. Secondary educational institutions will need to change: high school.

Educational institutions are resistant to meaningful change, and quick to embrace superficial gestures which look like change. What is needed in American high schools in order to fix the gender gap?

• Rigor
• Physicality
• Competition
• Structure
• Discipline

Male students respond positively to rigor, as do female students. But in the absence of rigor, male students disengage quickly, while female students will stay engaged longer. Why? The reason isn’t important; the observable, measurable, and quantifiable outcomes are. Rigor is when students receive curricular content, and their learning is measured by their abilities to demonstrate skills (“know how”) and comprehension (“know that”).

All students benefit from engaging in physical exercise, but boys show a bigger statistical bump when they have regular movement. This can be as simple as taking a walk, a bicycle ride, or a swim most days. Outside the United States, some schools devote 15 or 30 minutes to calisthenics each morning before instruction starts. The prevalence of high school athletics in the United States blurs the concept a bit: For students who aren’t interested in team sports, they need to understand that physical fitness can be obtained by simple daily routines like walking, and needn’t involve teams, games, coaches, and officials; for students who are on a school team, they need to remain active in their off seasons, and their coaches need to ensure that practice times regularly include cardiovascular workouts and aren’t merely strategy sessions in the locker room.

Boys are more likely to invest time, energy, and attention to content area learning when there is an element of competition. Best practices include acknowledging top performers (often in an “honor roll”); celebrating valedictorians; and publishing “rank in class” statistics at the end of the school year.

Structure helps all students, but especially boys. A school which emphasizes organizational habits, promptness, and routines builds a predictable environment. There can be exceptions, but they need to be few in number, and clearly announced as such. Even the arrangement of chairs and tables and desks in a classroom can communicate order or disorder; the former inspires achievement, while the latter encourages sloth.

Boys seek a clear understanding of discipline. Rules should be few, clear, and consistently enforced. Most boys, upon hearing or reading an instruction or a rule, ask silently, “and what happens if I don’t?” They will test the boundary to see if there is a prompt consequence for violation.

The gender gap poses a serious threat to America and to the credibility of America’s educational institutions. The statistics which reveal this gap are more significant than racial and income-related gaps. If the gap is not reduced or eliminated, society and the economy will pay a bitter price.

What We Know, and What We Fail to Do with That Knowledge: Marijuana in Schools

In many areas across the United States, the possession and use of THC and related substances for recreational purposes has been decriminalized, meaning that it is still a violation of federal law, but not a violation of local law, and that local law enforcement will not act on it, and local prosecutors will not prosecute it.

In most — all? — such places, it is stipulated that marijuana and related products will be sold only to those over the age of 21.

While the imposition of this age limit is well-intentioned, it is largely ineffective. Any sufficiently motivated high school student can find a way to obtain THC products, and the use of such products by underage individuals has increased both in high schools and in other locations.

The availability of “gummies” and baked goods and other edible products containing THC has changed how THC might be detected. In the past, marijuana most frequently smoked, and detection was based on odor and the presence of smoke, as well as paper, matches, and the marijuana itself.

The switch to edibles means that detection must pivot to devices which are able to detect THC, and perhaps also to animals trained to detect marijuana-related products.

There is no doubt, however, that documentation is growing, via research reports from universities and medical institutions, about the damage done by THC to young people.

THC has a different effect on people aged 25 and younger than it has on older people. Brain formation is still taking place up to the age of 25 or 26 — individuals vary slightly — and the introduction of various marijuana products into the bloodstream and into the brain steer that development away from its optimal trajectory. Numerous studies have shown not only correlation, but also causation, for outcomes like psychosis when THC is consumed by young people.

All of this is well known. Yet significant measures among high-school age students has yet to be taken. Parents, schools, and local law enforcement should be empowered to do more and encouraged to take meaningful action to reduce marijuana consumption among teenagers.

Now is not the time for timidity.

Educational Reform: When Everyone Knows What to Do, but Nobody Does It – Remove Smartphones from Schools

Often, changing an educational system is a contentious process, filled with passionate debate. Often, such changes require the commissioning of mountains of new research to inform any decision.

But sometimes, it’s simple and obvious.

Phrases like “settled science” and “professional consensus” are often overused, misused, and abused. But sometimes those phrases are accurate. Sometimes there really is a universal agreement — or one so statistically near universal that it counts as such.

Such is the case with electronics and young people. We don’t need one more research report on this. It is clear that smartphones, social media, and electronic gaming are harmful to young people: to their mental and physical health, as well as to their academic achievement.

The consensus is amazing: liberals and conservatives, progressives and libertarians, North and South, men and women, rich and poor, Republicans and Democrats, old and young; all religions, all races; all cultures; all ethnic groups. Everyone knows this.

But nobody does anything about it.

It would be a simple act: require students to turn in their smartphones at the beginning of the school day. They would receive them back on their way home at the end of the school day.

Yes, there would be a very small number of parents who’d make a very large amount of noise, protesting this. But the law is clear, and a school system could fend off any number of lawsuits about the topic.

And more than a few schools around the United States have already done this — public schools, private schools, charter schools — and done it successfully. The benefits among the student body are measurable and observable.

Yet the vast majority of schools have not yet done this. Why?

There is no doubt that confiscating the smartphones is good for the students. At some point in the future, questions will be asked about schools who failed to quickly adopt this most obvious of policies.

College Debt: When Student Loans Don’t Make Sense

There are many reasons to seek a college or university education: to become trained for a profession, to become intellectually well-rounded, to become a reflective voting citizen, to have an active social life on campus, to seek a spouse, and many other goals.

For none of these reasons is it wise to take on a massive amount of debt. Yet many students are doing precisely that in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

Education is often called an investment. Any investment is judged by the returns it yields, the “return on investment” (ROI).

The clear trend is that, over the last half-century, students have been making larger and larger investments, and much of those investments have been funded by larger and larger debt. Yet the growth rate for salaries is much lower than the growth rate for tuition, and for the loans needed to pay that tuition.

If education is conceptualized as professional training, then it fails to demonstrate a reasonable ROI. If the cost of earning a degree in a profession — engineering, law, medicine, etc. — has increased much more and much faster than the salaries of those professions, then it makes little sense to burden one’s self with debt to pay for such tuition.

It is even more illogical to assume debt if one is studying, not to be trained for a profession, but rather for any of the other reasons mentioned above.

Not only is accruing debt to pay for college unwise, it is also unnecessary: the price of university education is artificially high. A restructuring of America’s colleges and universities can maintain, or even increase, the quality of such education while reducing its price. The modern American university is marvelously inefficient in regard to its use of money, as Carol Roth writes:

However, in certain arenas, debt is being pushed and utilized in a way that is decoupled with achieving ROI. The biggest arena in which this is happening is college debt. In the US, college attendees, whether they had graduated or not, owed $1.6 trillion in college debt principal, aggregately, as of mid-2022.

Why haven’t the universities been reformed to offer better educations at lower prices? Because one powerful entity has a vested interest in keep the universities in their present condition: the government.

By maintaining the status quo in regard to the financing of college education, the government simultaneously achieves several objectives: First, because the government, and not private-sector lenders, does the majority of the lending, it thereby obtains a degree of control over those who are in debt. Second, because the universities rely on students paying large sums of borrowed money as tuition, the government has influence on postsecondary education.

In many cases, the size of an individual’s debt, and the degree on which universities rely on students obtaining large sums of borrowed money, justify the use of the phrase “debt trap” — alumni are held in effective servitude if they are still paying students loans several decades after graduation; colleges and universities understand that if student loan programs were to be reduced in size and scope, then they would be forced to become efficient at delivering quality education.

If these lending practices were used for home mortgages or car loans, the lenders would be prosecuted under the RICO statutes. But in this case, the lender is the federal government, as Carol Roth explains:

To put it bluntly, college and university degrees have become the biggest legal financial scam in the country, and the US government has morphed into the largest predatory lender in support of it.

To continue tricking students into taking out college loans, a barrage of propaganda is necessary to convince the public that a college education is the only path to personal or professional success. A side-effect of such propaganda is the neglect into which the non-collegiate skilled trades in the United States have fallen.

While the colleges indoctrinate America’s youth to believe that they must attend higher education at all costs, and especially at the higher costs which comfort the university’s administrators, the colleges themselves are being indoctrinated by the government to be or to do in such ways as will incline the government to maintain a given college’s status as eligible for student loans.

Each college or university — including the private ones, which are therefore less and less “private” — must comply with government protocols in order for its students to qualify for student loans.

If a college doesn’t comply, then its students will not be permitted to take out student loans, and the college won’t get the money. The students will move on to another college, one which complies with government ideas.

Neither the government nor the university has any motive to encourage students to reflect on whether the cost of the education is reasonable. Who will warn students away from taking on debts which will burden them for decades to come?

Carol Roth explains:

The profiteering college education structure is having a major impact on economic freedom and wealth creation for young individuals, as it does not enable a good financial return, or any return on investment in some cases, for too many of those buying education. Individuals aren’t contextualizing their choices about what they want to do and what they may need to do to fulfill their future objectives.

It is quite possible to restructure America’s colleges and universities so that students get educations which are as good, or better, than they are currently getting, but at a lower price — a price which would make massive college debt unnecessary. What is required is someone with the political will to encourage such restructuring.

School Effectiveness: Time and How It’s Used

One factor in the success of any endeavor or institution is the utilization of time. This is true of schools. Teachers have time; students have time. How does the institution empower, or prevent, teachers and students from using time well?

A teacher’s time can be divided, roughly, into three categories. First, the work done to prepare for the time spent with students; second, the time spent with students; third, the work done as a result of time spent with students.

In the first category are tasks like lesson design, resource creation, curation of existing resources, assessment design, etc.

In the second category, the teacher facilitates learning activities as the students do them, presents content, moderates student presentations, etc.

In the third category, the teacher evaluates student work, analyzing that work to determine which content the students have mastered and which content the students should further practice, etc.

Schools become inefficient and ineffective when teachers are required to spend time on anything which is not one of these three categories. The main culprit in this regard is meetings. Teachers held as captive audiences in faculty meetings are being deprived of the opportunity to do work which would help students.

Other non-productive uses of teacher time include the generation of various reports for administrators and participation in evaluation processes which are so badly designed that the resulting evaluations are meaningless.

Sadly, time spent on administrative busy work, faculty meetings, and poorly-conceived evaluation processes is not only non-productive, but rather counter-productive.

The result is not only lost chances for improved education, but actual degradation of the quality of education.

This is true, too, of many “professional development” — or “inservice training” or “continuing education” — events for teachers. These events are often as ineptly conceptualized as other administrative activities.

To improve the quality of education, schools must examine how teachers are required to spend their finite and valuable time. Any use of time which isn’t preparing for contact with students, which isn’t actual contact time with students, or which isn’t used after the contact time with students to process what happened during that time — any such use of time is actively harming the quality of education by forcing teachers to waste a limited and precious resource.

The Educational System’s Romance with Numbers: Why All the Statistics and Percentages?

In the decades-long and endless debate about grading and assessing, the conversation inevitably cycles around to the observation that evaluation systems are increasingly numerical. Current teachers, students, and parents are surprised to learn that only a few decades ago, a teacher’s gradebook might have far fewer numbers in it.

A century or two ago, a teacher’s gradebook might even have no numbers whatsoever: merely rows of letter grades.

Conversely, teachers and parents from a few decades ago would be surprised to see the massive spreadsheets which are contemporary grading programs, with grades calculated to two decimal places and weighted averaging of different categories.

How did this obsession with numbers arise?

There are multiple reasons.

One reason is a desire to be, or to at least seem, more scientific and objective. But here the appearance is stronger than the reality: while endless spreadsheets might give the perception of neutral analysis, critics have noted for decades that a great deal of subjectivity can lurk behind the outwardly sterile numbers.

A second reason is that teachers in recent decades have increasingly been placed in the position of having to defend grades. While this has always been the case to some extent, it is perhaps now more so than in the past. Spreadsheets and averages provide supporting evidence for the teacher who’s been asked to defend a grade.

An entire industry of gradebook software now exists to package the basic software engine of a spreadsheet into a larger framework of education-related terminology. A large number of online or downloadable grading programs are, at their cores, simply variations on a spreadsheet.

A great deal of time and effort is spent to create complex and sometimes confusing systems of grades, largely to generate a defensible grade in case a parent militantly objects.

Perhaps a more efficient use of the system’s work and energy would be to give a modicum of unassailability to issued grades. If grades — even if they contain the inevitable bit of subjectivity — were understood to be the educated judgment of an experienced subject matter specialist, then parents and students might not feel so free to question them.

The concepts of measurement and evaluation are used throughout civilization. Customers in a grocery store do not routinely question whether the twelve-ounce package of cheese is actually twelve ounces. Homeowners being billed for using 850 kilowatt-hours in a month don’t habitually voice doubts about the accuracy of the electric company’s measurements.

Why, then, do people feel free to question the grades which a teacher issues, causing teachers to waste countless man-hours in the generation of spreadsheets in grading software, so that such numbers are ready in reserve to defend grades?