Travis 1

Andrew Travis
Jim VanderMey
ENG.111.M01.
November 5 2016

Sheltered Uniformity

A maelstrom of information passes by; information students are not permitted to tap into.
They live with a bubble surrounding them, a finite shield with numbered days. Innocence in
many forms, including knowledge. Flash to a debate class divided nearly in half. Hateful looks
being shot across the room; the daggers a product of people trying to change their thinking. They
debate abortion; the morality that opposes it and the justification of unwanted life. Only once a
trimester in Shepherd High School, a small-town school in the center of Michigan, does this
debate go down. The participants cannot believe their ears, what they hear is almost foreign to
them: someone thinking the exact opposite way that they do. And that is because it is foreign.
Students such as these are so sheltered, that they do not know how to deal with these triggers,
these micro-aggressions that would set them off or possibly offend them. In this particular case,
it is a bunch of micro-aggressions thrown at them at the same time, some students, and especially
those with heavily religious beliefs close to heart, act out in volatile ways. One girl grabs a pair
of scissors off of a shelf and repeatedly stabs at her purse, attempting to mimic what the baby
goes through. Another simply walks up to the podium in tears that someone would disagree so
strongly with her core beliefs. Both students are struggling with the realization that they have

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been sheltered from harmful information. They experience these triggers and as soon as a
trigger is activated, they shut down. Like the warning lights on a car, triggers tell them
something is wrong, so they go into primal mode. These micro-aggressions are a natural part of
growing up, but high school students do not get enough of them, and it is not their fault. They are
conditioned to believe that their life inside the bubble will be their life out of it, conditioned to
believe that they are not sheltered.
It can be pinned in part on their environment, it can be said that the conformist society
they are placed in every day warps their minds. They are made to conform to the norm of schools
and education, to stoop down and bend to the standards set by the few for the sake of the many.
The standards they are forced to comply with make them a uniform group. Some of the schools
even require uniforms. Uniformity in some of the most strict senses suppresses the students need
to be free and discover of their own free will the will of the world and society. But some readers
would also say the uniformity unites the students, keeps them close and protected, gives them
order. To some, the order is absurdly unnecessary. Students with this point of view tend to rely
heavily on creative thinking, growing as a learner of philosophy and the intangible. The high
school environment to these students is constricting and confining, the uniformity a prison to
these Freirean-style thinkers. On the flip-side of the coin, those that appreciate the sense of order
take on a more Deweyan, scientific, organized intelligence view (Fishman 119). John Dewey
and Paulo Freire were educational reformative thinkers, whose ideas have been very influential
throughout history affecting not only education but society as well. John Dewey being from
America around the late 1800s to 1951, and Paulo Freire from Brazil who died in 1997. Both
styles of students need intellectual freedom, a more structuralized approach to the Deweyan

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students that caters to the individual, whereas the more Freirean thinkers want space and freedom
(Fishman 120). While uniformity as contextualized by these two thinkers can be interpreted to
mean two very different things, the sum of their thoughts are boiled down to the discrimination
between their ideals of democracy.
Paulo Freire and John Deweys thoughts of human nature are immensely different, just
like the divided debate classroom. The debaters ideals and morals clashing until the moderator
steps in to calm the storm. Once the students leave the classroom and enter the hallway, all
animosity is lost and forgotten in the sheltered canopy of the jungle of high school. Yet again
they return to the being the product of their environment, uneducated and unrefined, like a dull
sword only useful for buttering very large slices of toast. The two thinkers can individually
demonstrate that without a more diverse and differing path of education, without the
student-teacher contract and the disassembling of the banking concept, the knowledge input
method, the students will be caught in the middle, in the void between the paths, a product and
not a producer.
A product, much like that which confines them, of laws and mandates. Schools are much
like hospitals: upon walking into a hospital, one can smell the scent of sanitization; a frenzied
cleanliness that smells as sterile as the starched bedsheets. A high school is much the same, if
only one were not talking about the scent in reality, but of the environment the students are
bathed in daily. A stark difference between the education of experience and the education of the
school can be noticed, simply because the schools have been sanitized, stripped of anything
deemed unfit to be learned in the classroom. Stripped of anything that could harm students in
an emotional or spiritual way. Teachers cannot engage the class in conversation of religion,

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unless they remain unbiased partisans simply delivering the facts of religion in a history class or
a humanities class. Not a soul even touches on the issues within society today, what could be
behind them, who says what and even if that much is the truth. The environment students are
placed in shields them childishly from society and reality, and then upon graduation throws them
to the wolves, directly into the teeth of society. With such care placed upon the cleanliness and
sterilization of schools, they lose their ability to care for the students and cater more to their
needs. To see the big picture, you must first stand far enough back. And being so close to the
tapestry of life, the bigwig school admins see only a portion of the picture. Sheltering students
where they feel is necessary, yet failing to see they are hurting their students in the long run.
Perhaps this is one reason why college freshmen intoxication rates are so high: by
sheltering the students from the dangers of alcohol, the high schools (and the parents) have
pushed them to it because they are uneducated. And yet another aspect of society that remains
untouched, drinking problems and problems in general, where people turn to vice instead of
other people. By taking a Freirean approach to a Deweyan ideal, if Dewey were to say
community is the strength of humankind, Freire would deduce that community created the
problem in the first place. So therefore, by changing the way we think about community and
humanity, by realizing that humanity is not perfect and community is the strength of humankind
when we choose to use it, not acting tough like we have no problems, we can change who we
want to be as learners and teachers. We can de-sanitize the system, cleansing it of its puritanism
to help influence the minds of high school students to help better them, steel them for the future
and make them better thinkers and problem solvers. The canopy that looms over them, this

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ethical shield, only serves to make their oppressors (Freire 96) feel as though they have done
something of a service, when in reality they are only holding their pupils back.
Something more that holds learners back would be a straightforward education with little
depth and little diversity. Diverse learning has been stressed by our nation for years now, putting
heavy emphasis on equal representation of the races and people from all economic standings.
However, colleges that focus on the general education for all backgrounds typically have lower
retention rates and higher dropout rates (Hurtado 5). It is entirely possible that the problem lies
within society; the reason for the lack of interest in education is society is developing into a beast
that believes it does not need education to progress. This a consequence of sheltering the youth
from societys problems so they are led to believe that there are none. That being said, the
product of Mrs. Hurtados research has given us three educational outcomes that must be set
forth to create a more apt learning environment not only in college, but in high schools as well.
She finds that ...equity in student achievement and retention, increases in the habits of mind for
lifelong learning, and the development of multicultural and civic competencies, will put
students on the right path, and set educators on the path to get them there.
Step one: equity. Equity means a build-up of what is learned and building off of that to
branch out into a multifaceted individual. Increases in habits of mind for lifelong learning are
simply opening yourself up to education, opening yourself up to different points of view and
retaining that open-mind. Finally, quite possibly the most important part, the development of
multicultural and civic competencies. This is the culmination of people realizing the sheltered
environment high schools provide, and how they set us back as a unified people in a
non-uniformist society.

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With the implementation of this system and perhaps a Freirean style problem-posing
education (Freire 189), the system could be fixed and society could see the cure. To adopt a form
of intentionality (Freire 189), claiming what is ours and not succumbing to the media and the
pitfalls of misplaced trust by way of misinformation. Freire describes this as ...consciousness as
consciousness of consciousness. We are never simply conscious, but conscious of our actions
and experiences and consciously engaged in thought about said actions and experiences, which
transcends explicit consciousness. To Freire, we are always conscious of what is happening,
what we are succumbing to. Our conscience would have to agree. To shelter young adults is
only rendering them helpless in a sea of misinformation; a media-saturated environment assails
them only to dislodge any prior thoughts of individualism. For the education system to work in
conjunction with the media seems preposterous, but air feeds the flame, and so too do the
uneducated and inexperienced feed misinformation in a savage circle.
Without being able to face societys demons with an open mind and clear, fair thinking to
be conscious of our actions, we are setting ourselves up for disaster. So in college, these societal
micro-aggressions are suddenly thrown at the prospective students. Microaggressions, a term
coined by Greg Lukianoff and his colleagues, comes to the conclusion that this climate of
childish, sheltered students is becoming institutionalized, a nation-wide movement of sheltered
conformity, like the coddling of a child. This movement that Lukianoff documents sanitizes the
American education system, rendering it useless in solving complex social problems. This new
environment is controlled by the educators, but they feel they cannot control it because if they
clamp down on political correctness and politeness to one's feelings, their number of incoming
students will drop. If colleges cannot fix the problem, it must be fixed closer to the root, in an

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environment where the students do not have nearly as much control. The Diverse Learning
Environment Mrs. Hurtado and her team came up with is a start. We must build upon the
different environment, stand atop the uniformity and bring in a system that nurtures based on
need and ability to ask questions to further individual growth. To take shelter is to be unprepared
for the aftermath, a product of sheltering in the first place. Misinformation misguides the
uneducated, often leading them to an aggressive state of contentedness, showing no signs of
growth and wanting to keep it that way. These microaggressions are again a product of the
sheltered atmosphere of high schools, and so too does society remain in a downward spiral.

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Works Cited
Fishman, Stephen M., and Lucille Parkinson McCarthy. Whose Goals? Whose Aspirations?:
Learning to Teach Underprepared Writers across the Curriculum. Logan: Utah State UP,
2002. Print.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 2000. Print.
Hurtado, Sylvia, Cynthia L. Alvarez, Chelsea Guillermo-Wann, Marcela Cuellar, and Lucy
Arellano. "A Model for Diverse Learning Environments." Higher Education: Handbook of
Theory and Research (2012): 41-122. Print.
Lukianoff, Greg. The Coddling of the American Mind. The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company.
Web. 06 Nov. 2016.