It has always been thought that education is a means of creating citizens who are critical, ethical, and compassionate. But in much of the world, educational systems more closely resemble autocratic states that are more concerned with compliance, obedience, and conformity than with dialogue, imagination, and empathy. The photo of students marching away in lockstep symbolically and metaphorically represents the personality of a system that prioritises control and conformity over individual development and social-emotional learning.
The question at the centre of this is whether schools, either unconsciously or consciously, are established to promote obedience as the dominant value, at the expense of eliminating potential for communication and building empathy. This is a profound question with long-term implications for education, but also for society in general, as tomorrow’s decision-makers, leaders, and citizens will be today’s students.
This essay delves into the causes of obedience’s apparent supremacy over empathy within schools and examines systemic, cultural, and historical root causes of the trend. It also sets out action steps that schools must implement to balance discipline with emotional intelligence and construct cultures that value highly communication, inclusion, and human connections.
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Historical Origins of Obedience in Education
A realisation of the history of formal education systems can assist no one in understanding why obedience can’t be trumped by empathy in school. Many schools today are based upon the industrial revolution, whose purpose was to teach not only knowledge but also to create orderly workers who would be able to function within hierarchical structures. The ringing of the imitation of whistles was heard in factories, rows of desks lined in parallel that resembled assembly lines, and strict time schedules all praised punctuality and conformity (Bowles & Gintis, 1976). This “factory model” of education instilled virtues of obedience, respect for authority, and conformity, but not creativity, empathy, or individuality.
Even before industrialisation, church-based and military-style schools had promoted obedience, memorisation, and blind loyalty. In societies in general, the teacher was the figure of authority to whom not even a question could be raised. Talking was seen as subversive to discipline, and compassion was secondary to conformity. Such archaic tendencies still leave a long shadow on current education, where obedience to tradition still holds sway in the face of sloganeering for integral development.
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The Cultural Construction of Obedience
Obedience is a positive ethical value showing respect for tradition, authority, and elders in most societies. Asian, Latin American, and African cultures, for instance, are collectivist and hierarchically deferent, with the children required to obey adults as well as teachers (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Respect is never negative, but it tiptoes towards mindless obedience with no space for communication or building emotional intelligence.
Pressure to perform well on tests adds further fuel to obedience. Society and families define good behaviour as school success and reward obedience rather than thinking. Teachers, themselves fearful of class sizes, also find it easy to demand obedience instead of free communication. Cultural values, therefore, support the myth that “good students” are quiet, compliant, and obedient—qualities not so conducive to developing empathy or free communication.
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Systemic Pressures: Tests and Standardisation
One of the best arguments for obedience reigning in schools is curriculum standardisation and testing. High-stakes testing promotes cramming, with little room for reflective speech or affective testing. Students learn to follow instructions verbatim, memorise facts, and regurgitate them on the tests. These practices systematically reinforce obedience to authority and penalise creative or critical deviations (Kumar, 2016).
Teachers are also under a rigid syllabus and accountability stress. Classroom discussion, by definition unstable, can “waste time” in testing systems. Empathy cannot be easily measured and evaluated in terms of test scores. System structures, therefore, drive schools toward compliance rather than relational or conversational skills.
Discipline as a Measure of Control
School discipline, therefore, comes to be linked with obedience more than self-discipline. Schools enforce uniforms, punctuality, silence, and classroom behaviour through rules designed not to teach respect and mutual understanding but to exert control. Marching in lines, reciting pledges, and standing in formation serve not as exercises in responsibility but as ritual expressions of obedience.
Positive actions such as detention, suspension, or corporal punishment (in certain circumstances) affirm this paradigm and inform the child that obedience is sustained by punishment and not nurtured by empathy. Focusing on external controls prevents students from understanding how their behaviour affects others, thereby limiting their ability to empathise and think morally.
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Psychological Impact of Prioritising Obedience
The strong focus on conformity has enormous psychological benefits to students. Research indicates that authoritarian learning environments may generate stress, lower self-esteem, and inhibit experimentation (Deci & Ryan, 2000). When adults constantly silence children, discredit their voices, and dismiss their feelings, children learn that conforming is safer than being authentic.
In addition, Empathy, driven by affective sensitivity and perspective-taking, suffers when students are asked to suppress their feelings and thoughts. Discussion takes openness, respect, and active listening—skills that cannot develop where students are scared off from voicing their opinions. Therefore, the psychic toll of a compliance emphasis is diminished emotional intelligence, constricted social skills, and no ability to participate in democratic discussion.
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Teachers and Classroom Practices
The instructor, as an agent of power, has the mandate to transmit or counter the obedience model as well. Teacher training in most institutions focuses on subjects and classroom management rather than social-emotional learning. Without training in conflict resolution, empathy building, or dialogic skills, teachers resort to positive discipline to control classrooms.
Hierarchies in the classroom, in which the teacher talks and students listen, exist to perpetuate the power structure. Student questions are often discouraged, especially when they challenge authority. Conversation is one-way, consisting of teacher-to-student dissemination, with minimal space for mutual meaning-making. In the absence of teacher training in relational pedagogy and empathy, there is a cycle where compliance is the assumed standard.
Societal Reinforcement of Obedience
Prioritising obedience in schools is also supported by society-wide norms. Societies, policymakers, and parents alike desire to think about discipline as good education. Schools where students sit quietly in rows with neat uniforms are often considered “good,” while those promoting free expression and creativity are sometimes viewed as unruly or permissive.
It is based on a deep fear of chaos: without rules, teachers think, classrooms will become anarchy. These fears assume, however, that it is not possible to create self-discipline by using empathy, responsibility, and discussion. Instead, schools simply mirror larger social power relations in which submission to authority is valued over participatory engagement.
The Overlooked Role of Empathy in Curriculum
Empathy, long understood to be a necessary life skill, never finds room in the school curriculum. Social-emotional learning (SEL) programs are increasing around the world, but too often lag behind academic content. Subjects like literature, arts, and civic education, which foster empathy through narrative and dialogue, are often undervalued in high-stakes testing systems.
In addition, moral education or pedagogy of values, if there is any, appears in the guise of prohibited teaching rather than as dialogic questioning. Far from inviting students to live in alternative frames of reference or engage with moral issues, institutions in the guise of pedagogy dictate “right” and “wrong” action. Such didacticism stifles experience and reflective forms involved in actual empathy construction.
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Towards Dialogue and Empathy: The Call for Reform
Schools need to be reconstituted as spaces of dialogue and empathy through changes in systems, culture, and pedagogy. The process begins by recognising that obedience and empathy are distinct and must be intentionally integrated. There needs to be discipline in the group process, but it has to be in the context of mutual respect and self-discipline, not blind obedience.
Teachers, education policymakers, and parents must redefine “good student.” Instead of promoting silence and obedience, school cultures should foster curiosity, collaboration, and compassion. Curricular and structural reforms are crucial to redefining how schools are organised and evaluated.
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Strategies for Developing Empathy and Awareness at School
1. Integrating Social-Emotional Learning (SEL)
SEL programs can shape students’ empathy, conflict resolution, emotion regulation, and perspective-taking abilities. Integrating SEL into the regular curriculum allows schools to enhance emotional understanding alongside academics. Programmes like CASEL in America are one of the prime examples of how SEL can enhance academic achievement, along with empathy.
2. Dialogical Pedagogies
The instructors need to become adept at dialogic ways of inviting discussion, interrogation, and co-intelligence. Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” is dialogue-driven as a means to freedom and critical consciousness. Through taking part in formal debate, group work, and circle reflection, the learners can grow empathetic by arguing on behalf of other individuals’ points of view.
3. Redefining Discipline
Discipline should shift from a punitive approach to a restorative one. Education in restorative justice forces the students to own up to what they have done, to consider how they have wronged other individuals, and to compensate. It builds empathy by making them think about the effect their actions have on other individuals and society as a whole.
4. Empathy Training for Teachers
Teacher training should focus mainly on conflict resolution, emotional intelligence, and relationship skills. Teachers’ empathy in response to the students is the one which makes their classrooms respectful places where they eradicate fear from each other. School improvement plans must incorporate training in nonviolent communication, listening, and pedagogical sensitivity to culture.
5. Curriculum reforms
Arts, reading, and civics must be prioritised as they form the foundation of meaningful learning. They lead to opening the students up to a wide range of experiences, introducing them to ethical issues, and making them sympathetic. Student and community cooperation beyond the school can also facilitate students’ sensitivity to social conditions.
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6. Parental and Community Involvement
Educators must question parents and communities about why empathy should be included in schools. Campaigns must problematize the way in which a “good school” has been defined as a compliant and quiet school. Intergenerational conversation, peer mentoring, and service learning projects may liberate empathy from the classroom cage.
7. Student Voice and Agency
Educators must provide students with avenues to voice their perspectives and involve them in decision-making. Student councils, feedback mechanisms, and school participatory structures of governance can shift the culture of control from the top down into the culture of collaboration. The adoption of the principle of student agency encourages responsibility as well as the growth of empathy towards perspectives that come from diverse sources.
Challenges and Resistance to Change
Even with all the possible good that such a change might bring, there will be resistance. Institutions root regimes of standardised testing, and parents can complain about what seems to erode discipline. Teachers can resent one more set of standards, and policymakers will revert to quantifiable academic success over people skills.
Also, neither order nor empathy is self-evident. Overemphasising dialogue at the expense of structure will invite anarchy, and overemphasising empathy at the expense of boundaries will lose justice. Reform must then entail sophisticated, case-by-case techniques instead of bulk rejection of discipline.
Conclusion
The “marching in line” metaphor conveys the long history of schools’ overemphasis on obedience, in which obedience is too frequently valued over dialogue and empathy. Although obedience is paramount in keeping bodies in line and acting as a crowd, valuing obedience above all other dimensions of schooling underemphasizes the psychological, emotional, and democratic promise of schooling. The legacies of the past, culture, the requirements of the system, and the expectations of society all contribute to overemphasising obedience.
But schools can change by connecting discipline with compassion. By connecting pedagogic reform with curricular reform, teacher education, and community outreach, educators can reorient schooling away from producing obedient labourers and towards producing empathetic citizens. By putting dialogue and empathy at the heart of schooling, we can imagine classrooms not as places of coercion but as places of connection, understanding, and human flourishing. The challenge then is not rejecting discipline but rethinking discipline as built on respect and understanding—so that students no longer march in lockstep out of fear, but march in step with compassion and intention.
FAQs
1. How does the uprooted medieval culture impact discipline in Schools?
The impact of medieval culture in schools is complex and multifaceted at the same time. While the practices of Corporal punishments are now not viable, the emphasis on maintenance of ordinance and extra cautionary practices resulting in excessive rote learning are still viable, making their dominant stand in carving a generation of the disciplinary standards already set.
2. What is most popularly assumed about the present education systems and their impact on the functioning of schools?
With the passage of time, the enrolment rates increased, leading to the implementation of policies for the provision of quality and inclusive education. But, as time goes by, the quality is eroding and the quantity is still increasing, forcing the school systems to work excessively by progressively taking up extra shifts.
3. Has the school system finally succeeded in enhancing empathy through its actions?
We can never accurately say that schools have fully reached their goal, but policymakers have made and implemented policies to enhance social-emotional learning, a new and highly effective way to achieve it step by step.
References +
Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America: Educational reform and the contradictions of economic life. New York: Basic Books.
Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). (2020). What is SEL? Retrieved from https://casel.org/what-is-sel/
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behaviour. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01
Freire, P. (1970/2000). Pedagogy of the Oppressed (30th anniversary ed.). New York: Continuum.
Kumar, K. (2016). Political agenda of education: A study of colonialist and nationalist ideas. New Delhi: Sage Publications.
Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98(2), 224–253.https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.98.2.224
Morrison, B., & Vaandering, D. (2012). Restorative justice: Pedagogy, praxis, and discipline. Journal of School Violence, 11(2), 138–155.https://doi.org/10.1080/15388220.2011.653322
Noddings, N. (2012). The ethics of care: Personal, political, and global. Berkeley: University of California Press.
UNESCO. (2021). Reimagining our futures together: A new social contract for education. Paris: UNESCO. Retrieved from https://unesdoc.unesco.org
