Overall, I really agree with Sarah McCarthy. I feel like there is a huge danger caused by over obedience. A lot of terrible events have occurred because of this very problem. I feel that some solutions would be to introduce creativity and the value of all subjects back into the curriculum. Also, as I discussed in my post on Bloom's Taxonomy, we need to develop more higher level thinking in our students. With these changes, we would be able to give our students the knowledge and capability to fight over obedience. Creativity will allow them to learn to value their differences and be able to come up to more possible ways to deal with the situations they face. Making subject emphasis more equal will allow students to be more well-rounded, so that they are able to have the knowledge they need to assess the accuracy of information presented to them and they will know about the very topic of over obedience. Higher level thinking will give them the ability to think critically on their own and to thoroughly assess the information they receive. I definitely agree that over obedience should require therapy. Often it has more catastrophic consequences than lack of obedience.

I very much agree with this article to, and as I read it I really evaluated my own experiences with this concept of "two much obedience". I can recall sitting in many classes and thinking that I might have the wrong answer, so I would just agree with someone elses opinion. It was almost like a fear that came over me and It was easier to agree than to disagree, even when I felt disagreeing was called for. This concept is very scary because what we are seeing is to much dependence on others and less dependence on individual thinking and decisions. As teachers I think we need to be able to find a way to encourage higher level thinking and also independent thinking. We are all different and in most situations we probably have different opinions on things, but we are quicker to conform and obey than to go against the "norm" and say what we really think. I know this is not true with everyone but I am just saying this as a general observation!

This article intrigued me. I understand where the author was coming from about how we need to keep an eye on the overobedient children as well as the troublemakers. You may have a student in your classroom that listens to every word you say and follows directions perfectly. So naturally, if the child is obedient then you feel like they are okay and do not need any further discipline. But as some of the studies from this article suggested sometimes we listen to authority too much and may need to stretch out and be our own person. It is hard to believe that some of the most well behaved kids that grew up in our educational system grew up to be some of Jim Jones' or Charles Mansons' followers. We really all need to learn when it is okay to disobey and not to listen to someone all the time just because they maybe higher up than we are. If we feel that there are telling us to do something wrong we need to back away from that and disobey!

I also found this article to be very relevant to the world we are living in today. It seems as thought everywhere we turn we are striving to act “obedientâ€

In my opinion this article is entirely relevant. It is easy for us to read newspaper articles and see documetaries about Jonestown and say to ourselves, "that would never happen to me". But how can we be so sure? The 900+ people who willingly took their own lives or the lives of their innocent children were not monsters. Nor were they mentally disabled or incompetent. But one thing they were was brainwashed. They were brainwashed by the Jim Jones and his powerful sermons. Jim Jones was a powerful leader, and because of that almost one thousand people willingly died for him.

The same goes for Hitler and his Nazi soldiers. It is so easy to look at pictures from the Holocaust and say to yourself "what horrible monsters". But this is not all black and white- there is a grey area that has to be explored. I am not saying Hitler was not evil- obivously he was the personifcation of the word. But his minions, who did nothing more than follow orders, cannot be judged so directly. Was what they did wrong? Absolutely. Should they have gone unpunished? Absolutely not. But what I am saying here is that the Nazi soldiers who burned the bodies of thousands of Jewish people went home at night with those same hands and kissed their wifes and hugged their children. They did what they thought was their duty, because that it was their evil leader told them to do.

The point McCarthy is trying to make is that it is so easy to see situations like the Holocaust and Jonestown and believe that the people who followed these leaders were insane or evil, but that is not the case. We live in an obedient society that will gladly follow a leader. So what would we do, if Hitler was our leader? Or Jim Jones? It is an extremely frightening concept to think about, but it is also extremely relevant to our society.

I have never, ever thought about obedience as a bad thing. I have never really thought about obedience at all. That is an interesting subject, however, and I can certainly see how hyper-obedience can be a terrible thing. It has just never occurred to me. Of course, though, extreme obedience to one's superiors is what has caused so many terrible things in the past and what may cause a terrible tragedy brewing for the future. If the Nazis had not listened to Hitler, how many out of the 6 million would have died? Jim Jones is another that brainwashed his followers. I am not certain how a stranger can come into a life and completely obliterate all the good sense a person had previously, though. I also hope I never have to find out. We do need to stop churning out obedient zombies in public school. It seems like we need to teach children to question authority in a healthy way and still be able to continue to teach them without a huge mutiny. What way that would be though, is beyond me.

This article was extremely fascinating. McCarthy makes a number of valid points concerning the over emphasis of obedience. While the events that took place at the hands of Hitler, Manson and Jones are devastating, one can’t help but be intrigued by these people. How could someone so evil and demented be so appealing to the masses? It’s hard to imagine humans being brainwashed in such extreme ways. I liked the fact that this article presented a lot of questions that really made me think. What can we do to prevent things like this from happening again? We want our students to obey the rules and our citizens to obey the law, but where’s the line? I think we have to be obedient to a certain extent while still being sure to be ourselves. We have to make conscious and wise decisions based on what we know is right, not just by what we’re told.

This article is the first bit of evidence that has ever made me believe that obedience can be a bad thing. McCarthy makes many valid points and raises several interesting questions. It is hard to imagine that people could be so obedient that they would follow even the most corrupt leaders. These leaders have a personality that can easily brainwash people into following and supporting them. This is very sad and scary to think about. I can't imagine ever supporting someone like this, but you never really know how you would react until you are personally put into the situation. What can we do in order to prevent event such as Jonestown from happening again? How do we teach our students to obey rules and regulations, but also follow their heart and always do what they feel is the right thing to do?

I as well found this article to raise interest in looking at obedience in a different way. As it has been stated this is a concern for those that are obsessed with being obedient and how it could be a bad thing. I believe that in every situation things can get out of hand and be taken to the extreme. Even though there are certain situations in which obdience was taken to the extreme I think that society can not function without it. If we were to take away obedience I think the world would be in a much worse place than just having the ones that follow everything that everyone says. I feel if we prepare our students and help them to understand the difference in right and wrong this may not be such a big problem in the future. It is always a good thing to have structure and to follow what you know is right but it is also important to know when someone is trying to mislead you into doing something you should not do and I think it is our job as future educators to be able to explain the difference to the children we are going to teach. I do believe this is article is relevant to today's society and that is something that we should take very seriously and try our best to prevent things like these drastic events from happeneing again.

When I read the article I agreed highly with the author. Humans are so trained to obey and please any higher authority. When parents raise their children they teach them their rules and guidelines and when the child disobeys then they are punished. This results in a lifetime of obedience which is hard to break when you are older. It is hard for a child who grows up learning one way but thinks another. It is typically so hard for that child to voice their own opinion, either in the classroom, at home, or with friends. When a child enters a classroom and are told to speak their mind, some are so scared that they will get punished and the teacher or their parents will not be happy. This is not to say that these things happen for every student. There will be some students who will have no problem speaking their voice and being "disobedient". I know however, from personal experience, that it can be very hard as a child or an adult to speak out (speak your opinion) to an higher authority whom you feel would be very disappointed in you for doing so. As teachers, it is important that we help our students not feel this way. It is important to me that my students feel like they can say any opinion they have in a discussion or feel safe enough in my classroom that they can come to me and say they disagree about something.

I feel that institutions such as education and the military do teach obediance to the extreme. Although I feel that kids do need to learn to be obediant but only to an extent. They should also learn to think out of the box and to disagree sometimes and especaially to be creative. I thought that the milgram experience that we watched today demonstrated being obdiant in a bad light. The man kept giving shocks because someone was pushing him to do it, and he was just "following the rules" of the experiment. I feel that teaching kids not to be so obediant is a lot harder than it sounds though. I think teachers definately have to know how to balance teaching obediance with teaching creativity and to be opinionated. I do feel that kids should be able to disagree but I also feel that kids should be taught obediance, especially at the elementary school level just for behavior reasons.

Ok so I will be completely honest and admit to not reading all of the above posts so I do not know if I am restating something already said.

The question that comes up to me when speaking about the word obedience is not really just somebody doing as they are told. In the education world it is sometimes looked at that way but it really shouldn't be. Behavior and obedience go hand in hand in the language of education but are they used in the correct manor? For a student to behave do they have to be obedient? As a teacher none of your students should be obedient and you should not ask them to be. Let me explain what I mean by obedient. Obedient is to follow blindly. To do as told with out questioning. You should not only teach the students to ask questions and clarifications but also how to ask questions. Do not try to teach something "just because it is what we are suppose to teach" teach it and know why the students need to learn it. Tell them this is how to add 2+2 and make it equal 4 but also show them how you came up with that number. It is about making them ask questions, and discovering new things that you might not have thought to teach because you didn't know they were ready for that information. Or maybe you figured that well 2+2=4 and that is all there is to it. Ask questions yourself as well. If you teach history and you see that George Washington was the first president of the independent states of america then question how he got that position, how he positioned himself for greatness throughout his life, what was up with his wooden teeth. But the most important thing is to expect questioning from your students and encourage that. Questions is where they learn not lectures. (for most) Don't teach obedience, teach questions and behavior will follow.

I never really thought about obedience as an issue. I always knew to obey my teachers and to obey my parents and even as Casey said, I would always agree with my classmates because of this horrible fear of being wrong. But I guess when I look from the outside in I can see that too much obedience can be a huge issue. That is what the Holocaust boiled down to, is it not? Too much obedience led to the genocide of 6 million + people! But how do you handle this is the classroom? I mean you want your students to obey you. I guess you just have to be careful about what you ask for. It also makes me wonder if I am one in the 50% of people who would obey at any cost. I like to think of myself as a person with high morale but who's to say that I wouldn't be extremely obedient in any circumstance...I love to follow the rules but I also am very firm in what I believe is right and wrong. How will kids in our classroom handle this? After all, they are not just obeying us. They are forced to be obedient all day long. Where is the line drawn? This is probably something that will always be a question in my mind.

Obedience, like anything else, can go in either a good or bad direction. As a future teacher, I hope that my students are obedient to some level. However, I never want my students to be obedient to the point that they are blindly listening to and following everything I tell them. I think that it is important to listen to other viewpoints and opinions, but I think it's even more important to take what you hear, think about it, and form your own evaluations and opinions based on everything you've experienced. I think that everything should be questioned until you come to a firm opinion and viewpoint of your own. So, I hope that my students can do this. That they can take what I tell them and turn around and respectfully make their own, unique opinions from it. As we saw in this article, complete obedience can be very dangerous, and even though we don't normally think of it as such, we need to be more cautious when it comes to following anyone and being obedient, especially when the choice to do so conflicts with your own personal beliefs. Think critically about every situation your in, and make sure that you aren't just being obedient for obedience sake.

I agree that I had not given much thought to obedience as a bad or dangerous thing. However, after reading the article it left me with an eerie feeling. It is discomforting to think that obedience can be taken so far as to blindly follow a murderer in disguise. I think that in order to help children balance this obedience, there must first be a good sense of right and wrong. If this is taught and shown in classrooms and in daily life, then obedience can be brought into play. I would want my children/students to be obedient to things that are right in character or morals. Yet I would want them to recognize when something is wrong and to question that scenario. If they truly believe that something is wrong, then they should have a right to disobey. This of course comes with very thin boundaries, because as teachers we would never want our students to become completely disobedient to things that they wish to be "wrong" when in actuality it is the right thing to do. This whole concept of obedience is very fragile and must be watched and constantly reviewed.

I agree that obedience is necessary in the classroom, as well as in everyday life. However that does not say that students should not have the "right" to question and challenge the subject matter. That is how they learn, when they ask questions.
I also feel that obedience and respect go hand in hand. I am interning this semester at a local high school, and there is definitely a lack of respect and therefore a lack of obedience in the classroom of Seniors that I am in. I believe that as educators, we must "demand" respect in our classroom for our children/students to obey-the respect does go both ways though. I am not saying that they must behave in military fashion and ask permission to perform a simple task, but the normal behavior. I want my students to feel comfortable in their classroom, because after all it is their classroom. I do not want to create an environment where my students feel brainwashed or that their opinion is not valued!