Control, Conformity, and Compulsory Schooling: Three Article Reviews
This paper presents critical reviews of three articles examining the role of control and conformity in American public education. The first review analyzes Noam Chomsky's argument that schools prioritize corporate interests over genuine intellectual development. The second evaluates David A. Gabbard's comparison of compulsory schooling to imperialistic market enforcement, drawing parallels to the church's historical use of doctrine. The third examines Christopher G. Robbins's investigation of zero-tolerance disciplinary policies, racial disparities in school discipline, and the use of force against students. Across all three reviews, the paper assesses each author's use of evidence, persuasive effectiveness, and analytical strengths and weaknesses.
- Chomsky on Schools, Funding, and Corporate Control: Chomsky's argument that corporations shape school curricula
- Critical Assessment of Chomsky's Argument: Weaknesses in Chomsky's evidence and persuasive claims
- Gabbard on Compulsory Schooling and Market Society: Gabbard links schooling to market enforcement and imperialism
- The Church, Fear, and Educational Enforcement: Church doctrine as a parallel to corporate educational control
- Robbins on Zero Tolerance and Racial Discipline: Robbins examines race, force, and zero-tolerance school policies
- Assessing the Case Against Zero-Tolerance Policies: Strengths and limitations of Robbins's concluding argument
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper maintains a consistent evaluative stance across all three reviews, acknowledging each author's strengths while clearly identifying gaps in evidence and logical leaps.
- Direct quotations from the source articles are integrated throughout, giving the analysis a grounded, text-based quality that supports the reviewer's judgments.
- The reviews identify a recurring thematic thread — the use of control in education — and trace it coherently across three very different authorial approaches and arguments.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates critical reading and comparative review. Rather than simply summarizing each article, the student evaluates the persuasive effectiveness of each, noting where claims are supported by evidence and where they rely on opinion or anecdote. This balance of summary and critique is a core skill in academic writing at the undergraduate level.
Structure breakdown
The paper is organized into three sequential article reviews. Each review follows a pattern: introduce the article's central argument, highlight key points with direct quotation, and then offer a critical assessment of the article's strengths and weaknesses. The third review is the most evidence-rich, engaging closely with page-level statistics and specific incidents, while the first two lean more heavily on conceptual critique.
Chomsky on Schools, Funding, and Corporate Control
The first article, "The Function of Schools: Subtler and Cruder Methods of Control" by Noam Chomsky, deals with schools and their funding. The questions posed by the interviewing participants add a layer of complexity and help bring focus to the undeniable issues that many American schools and the education system face. Among the topics discussed, funding plays a crucial role in how educational institutions create curriculum and promote learning. One example mentioned is the company IBM and how it trained engineers not to be the best engineers possible, but to be the best at performing the skills necessary to accomplish its profit-driven goals.
This resulted in schools like MIT focusing on producing graduates suited to the needs of corporations in order to receive the adequate funding required to keep their institutions running. The mention of Allan Bloom and the desire for students to learn a specific kind of curriculum — or ideology — deemed appropriate helps clarify early on the reasoning schools have for teaching in a certain way: to keep the population under some level of control. America, it is argued, favored a more functional model of teaching over a more cohesive and inventive one. The popularity of the Bloom phenomenon, Chomsky suggests, is mostly a reaction to the liberating effect of the student movement of the 1960s — meaning that the more people rebelled against the established system, the more others sought to keep it structured and controlled.
A significant part of the reason education in America is faltering lies not so much in the material covered, but in how that material is understood and absorbed. The article states that memorizing something is not the same as learning it, because there is no meaning and no personal experience attached to mere memorization. When a learner attaches personal meaning to the act of acquiring knowledge, that knowledge is less likely to be forgotten and more likely to be applied over time.
The main idea the article conveys is expressed on page 28: "Real education is about getting people involved to think for themselves." This reflects the author's attempt to convey the ineffectiveness of simply following orders and instructions. If people think independently and learn in a way that is meaningful to them, they will accept acquired knowledge more readily and effectively. American society as a whole — especially in the present day — is focused on corporations and capitalism. The American dream, the article implies, is more about fitting in than standing out. This tendency appears to generate lower quality in education and an accumulation of mediocre skills rather than great and unique minds.
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