How Our Education System Socializes Us: Teaching Hierarchies

Throughout our twelve years of school (or more if one decides to pursue higher education), our minds are inundated with a huge onslaught of information. Of course, at its most basic and superficial level, we’re learning specific lessons in math, science, English (at least in the United States), etc. through endless hours of repetition and memorization. However, a bit deeper, we’re also being socialized subconsciously to fit into how we’ve designed our society post graduation.

It’s pretty obvious when you really think about it what deeper lessons we’re learning through school. However, I think that it’s so obvious to us that it is easy to completely overlook how these formative years have programmed our minds to act in extremely specific ways in order to mesh well with the adult world.

I’ve spoken a lot in former blog posts about my qualms with the education system, how it discourages authentic expression, and how it is designed to create mindless employees. Right now, I’m going to explore a bit further how it instills the idea of a hierarchy into our minds through extremely overt methods.

First of all, in school, there is a hierarchy established based on age and intelligence.

For the most part, students are separated based on what grade they’re in and what level they’re at in each particular class (special education, academic, honors, AP, IBE, etc.) Whether intentional or not, there is a differing degree of value attributed to each academic level as well as each grade.

Teachers, being older and supposedly more intelligent, are seen as authority figures, elevating them above the student population. And of course, janitors, principals, superintendents, etc are at different levels of this hierarchy.

From this, as children, we subconsciously learn that some people have more value than others, and the level of respect they’re afforded is largely determined by where they fall on this hierarchy. Our understanding of this hierarchy becomes more complex as we get older, incorporating elements such as wealth, attractiveness, gender, race, country of origin, etc. By the time we’re adults, most of us likely have these ideas of inferiority and superiority lodged so deep into our minds, that it’s easy to be completely unaware of the extremely deep prejudices we hold.

Secondly, there is a hierarchy attributed to school subjects.

Just as we attribute a hierarchy to people, we also do the same with school subjects. There’s the core math, reading science and history, but the other subjects that fall into the arts category are merely extraneous classes, allocated very little time in comparison.

Because these subjects, outside of the core, are given significantly less time, it’s natural to believe that they’re only hobbies instead of viable life paths. And from here, it’s also easy to believe that the skills used in these particular fields are somehow less important than those in the core subjects.

When we graduate and move onto “adult life,” our society has been built in such a way that, unless you’re extraordinarily lucky, it’s quite difficult to make a stable living through an arts field. Just as schools socialize us to devalue the arts, we enter a larger society that also devalues it.

Is socialization a bad thing?

I guess it depends how you perceive it. In ways, socialization can be seen as a positive thing because it allows humans to live in some kind of relative harmony and understanding about unspoken rules that exist in a particular society. If everyone did whatever they wanted, all the time, with no regard for certain human constructs, our world would surely be more chaotic than it already is. School exists to subtly teach children these rules, and make them simple enough for the vast majority of people to understand and live by.

On the other hand, socialization can be viewed in a negative light if these social rules we are learning impact certain groups of people at disproportionate rates than other groups of people. The way we are currently socialized promotes social inequality, and does so in such a sneaky way that many of us are completely unaware of the human constructs we hold.