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"Why do you want to X?"
"Because my friends are and participating with them will provide us with shared memories and socialisation which will serve to further strengthen the bond of our friendship."
It seems contradictory to me, even hypocritical, that children are taught they ought to want to do things with other children but that they ought not do something because their friends are. I think what people are really after is ostensibly to teach from a young age the ability to recognise harmful or undesired actions and be in possession of the capacity to refuse participation in these even in the face of social pressure.
Except that parents or other authoritative people in a young person's life tend to want em to acquiesce to the pressures they place on em to engage in activities they approve of and to avoid those they disapprove of, often without particular reference to whether the person in question shares this desire. So we end up with apparently contradictory messages, such as that excursion in primary school in which teachers were insistent that I come join the other students in watching a video on why conformity is bad, rather than being off doing my own thing. I found that hilarious.
A certain degree of cooperation is necessary, so far as I can see, to keep a society functional, but I do not recall being taught this. Instead we get the message that we should do as everyone else is expected to, but not do what everyone else is doing, and thereby be anything we want to be.
Let's turn this around. Instead of[1] teaching people to resist peer pressure, let's teach people not to exert social pressure to coerce participation from the unwilling. Why must the onus be always on the victim to avoid being victimised? Why not teach people not to abuse the power and influence they have over others?
[1] As well as, really, but I like having a corrective footnote
"Because my friends are and participating with them will provide us with shared memories and socialisation which will serve to further strengthen the bond of our friendship."
It seems contradictory to me, even hypocritical, that children are taught they ought to want to do things with other children but that they ought not do something because their friends are. I think what people are really after is ostensibly to teach from a young age the ability to recognise harmful or undesired actions and be in possession of the capacity to refuse participation in these even in the face of social pressure.
Except that parents or other authoritative people in a young person's life tend to want em to acquiesce to the pressures they place on em to engage in activities they approve of and to avoid those they disapprove of, often without particular reference to whether the person in question shares this desire. So we end up with apparently contradictory messages, such as that excursion in primary school in which teachers were insistent that I come join the other students in watching a video on why conformity is bad, rather than being off doing my own thing. I found that hilarious.
A certain degree of cooperation is necessary, so far as I can see, to keep a society functional, but I do not recall being taught this. Instead we get the message that we should do as everyone else is expected to, but not do what everyone else is doing, and thereby be anything we want to be.
Let's turn this around. Instead of[1] teaching people to resist peer pressure, let's teach people not to exert social pressure to coerce participation from the unwilling. Why must the onus be always on the victim to avoid being victimised? Why not teach people not to abuse the power and influence they have over others?
[1] As well as, really, but I like having a corrective footnote
