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Miranda Young

William Reader

ENG 111. M18

18 April 2019

Conformity: A Means of Acceptance

Conformity is common among many social groups. To conform in a social group is to

comply or adhere to a set of rules or standards in regard to behavior that a specific groups deems

acceptable. Many people conform to these standards because they seek acceptance from others.

A great example of this situation is represented in the movie Finding Forrester (2000). The main

character, Jamal, lives in the Bronx and wishes to belong to a group of friends at his school. In

order to do that he purposely gets average grades (C’s) even though he is a much brighter student

and can easily get better grades because his other friends are average students, hides his love for

reading and writing because no one else in his social group enjoys them, and only ever talks

about basketball because that is what his friends enjoy doing. Jamal’s desire for acceptance drove

him to take lesser grades in school than he deserves, never share his work with writing, and only

obsess about what his friends are enjoy doing. Jamal’s physiological need for acceptance may be

enabling him to have friends, but it is also holding him back from truly expressing himself and

causing him change who he is for others.

Through Jamals’ experience with joining this friend group he has learned to like what

they like, do what they do, act how they act. It is almost as if he doesn’t think for himself, and

instead lets his friends guide his thought process. Jamal is unable to think autonomously, as Jack

Mezirow would say (89). Mezirow is an emeritus professor of adult education who wrote an

article called “Transformative Learning: Theory to Practice”, in which he explains the concept of
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autonomous thinking and its importance to the functioning citizens of the world. Autonomous

thinking is known as the idea of being able actively think for yourself, to obtain and use

information without guidance and also interpret it, to organize, to understand the complexity of

relationships (89). Mezirow says this about autonomous thinking in his writing, “Thinking as an

autonomous and responsible agent is essential for full citizenship in democracy and for moral

decision making in situations of rapid change” (89). In relation to the movie and Jamal, he is

being strained from his ability to think autonomously and from having the opportunity to express

his own thoughts and feelings in life because he wants to be accepted into this group and is

essentially allowing his friends to think for him by acting how they would in any given situation.

Jamal’s desire to belong to this friend group may even be causing him to change who he

is for his friends. He changed what he shares with them to only things that they like: basketball.

He hides his love for reading and writing because they find them useless. Eventually all he will

know is basketball because he is so limited as to when he can share his love for writing. bell

hooks, an African American scholar, experienced a similar situation in her life during her first

year of college. She wrote an article called “Language: Teaching New Worlds/New Words”

where she talks about how her usual use of language that is native to her family changes to a

more “white” and proper one. In her article she says, “Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to

be contained within boundaries. It speaks itself against our will, in words and thoughts that

intrude, even violate the most private spaces of mind and body” (hooks 56). hooks became so

used to speaking with a “white” language that it became involuntary, she rarely found herself

speaking the language she once used her entire life. She changed how she spoke because of the

environment she was in. Adding another perspective, Mezirow’s concept of autonomous thinking

relates to this, hooks is not speaking with her native language and instead using the one of her
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peers, which in turn is not allowing her to express herself, just as Jamal is not expressing himself

to his friends and missing out on opportunities as a result. They allow others to determine how

they should act and what they should like and this disables them from thinking autonomously,

which is crucial to growth and development as a person. As for Jamal, he only ever talks about

basketball because that’s what his friends are interested in and soon enough he will may never

talk about his writing because he has little opportunities to do so. Maybe he will eventually even

give up on this interest because of how his friends feel about it, like how hooks rarely used her

native language and instead used the “white” one because her peers used that language.

Another perspective to take into consideration is missing opportunities. Jamal is already

limited as to when he can read or write, and this limitation has the possibility to make him miss

out on opportunities to advance himself in the writing field. Jamal knows that if he takes action

to the opportunities he is provided with his friends will feel that he is drifting away from them

because they will no longer have the same interests. It will be almost as if they are living in two

different worlds. Perri Klass, a former medical student that wrote an article about her experience

while becoming a medical professional, experienced a similar situation to the one described

previously. In her article, “Learning the Language”, she includes a conversation she had with her

mother in which her mother could not comprehend the words Klass was using to describe her

day at work; “can you believe I had to put down three NG tubes last night?” asked Klass, “You’ll

have to tell me what an NG tube is if you want me to sympathize properly” her mother replied,

“NG, nasogastric―isn’t it obvious?” Klass stated (Klass 62). Now that Klass has become more

involved with the medical world she uses that langage in her other discourse communities, such

as with her family, and since her family doesn’t belong to that group they may be confused by

the vocabulary she uses to describe anything related to her job. When hooks spoke with her peers
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she had to use the language she learned in college or they would not understand her, eventually

she became so used to using it that she said this, “I have realized that I am in danger of losing my

relationship to my black vernacular speech” (hooks 58), so if she tried talk to anyone she knows

outside of her peer group they would be confused by her word choice. She adapted to her new

language and began using that one more than the one previous to that. Since Jamal’s friends do

not feel the same about writing or reading, if Jamal were to start expressing his love for it and

investing himself in the opportunities provided to him he would start to talk like a writer more

and more. Eventually Jamal will become so used to using the writer language he will start to use

it outside of his discourse community of writers, which is what happened to both Klass and

hooks when they spoke to their families with their new language. Jamal knows that if he speaks

to his friends with this language they will feel distanced from him because they do not share

writing as a mutually liked activity and they will not understand what he is talking about. His

friends will want to hang out with him less because they feel they they no longer share the same

interests and are part of different worlds, which is precisely why Jamal decides not to go after the

opportunities he is offered. In addition, Jamal should be able to think autonomously, as Mezirow

would say, about his writing and the opportunities that come from it instead of acting as if those

opportunities do not exist for the sake of his friendship.

The last concept for consideration is it being harder to succeed when you are concerned

with being accepted. Since Jamal's friends dislike reading and writing and he may be willing to

give up opportunities in order to save his friendship. He will continue to turn down any

opportunity that come his way because he values being accepted over what he finds joy in doing.

This continual cycle of choices on Jamals part will create a learned habit that can possibly be

difficult to break. Eventually, this learned habit of turning down opportunities because he knows
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there will be another one will disable him from furthering himself in life and getting the most out

of what he enjoys doing. Mike Rose, an educational psychologist at the University of California,

Los Angeles talks with struggling students and helps them for a living. In his article, “The

Politics of Remediation”, he examines some of the students he works with and studies their

struggles with learning. Rose mentions a student in his writing named Andrea, a “distressed

young woman who was failing Chemistry. Andrea could memorize facts and formulas but not

use them to solve problems” (Rose 114). Andrea had a good past with her previous schooling,

she was taught how to solve things and she continued to use that method ever since. But now that

she is attending college, a different school, she is being given different types of problems to

solve and she cannot figure out how to solve them because she is using the method from her

previous school, which does no work in this situation. She was so used to using the other method

that it became a habit for her, just like how Jamal can easily form a habit of denying

opportunities. Jamal will get used to the idea of denying opportunities because he thinks there

will always be another one down the road and he would rather keep his friends, and he will

eventually run out of opportunities. Jamal could easily become more concerned with being

accepted rather than furthering himself in life. He may even lose his relationship with the writing

language if he continues to abandon his opportunities, just like how hooks began losing her

native language while in college because she rarely had the chance to use it.

Conformity is common among many social groups. To conform in a social group is to

comply or adhere to a set of rules or standards in regard to behavior that a specific groups deems

acceptable. Many people conform to these standards because they seek acceptance from others.

A great example of this situation is represented in the movie Finding Forrester (2000) where the

main character, Jamal’s, desire for acceptance causes him to purposely gets average grades (C’s),
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never share his work with writing, and only ever talk about basketball. He does all these things to

maintain his friendship with a group of people that attend his school. Jamal’s physiological need

for acceptance may be enabling him to have friends, but it is also holding him back from truly

expressing himself and causing him change who he is for others.

Works Cited

bell, hooks. “Language: Teaching New Worlds/New Words.” Exploring Connections:

Learning in the 21st Century, Pearson, 2016, pp. 55-60.

Finding Forrester. Dir. Gus Van Sant. Columbia, 2000.

Mezirow, Jack. “Transformative Learning: Theory to Practice.” Exploring Connections:

Learning in the 21st Century, Pearson, 2016, pp. 86-93.

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Perri, Klass. “Learning the Language” Exploring Connections: Learning in the 21st Century,

Pearson, 2016, pp. 61-64.

Rose, Mike. “The Politics of Remediation.” Exploring Connections: Learning in the 21st

Century, Pearson, 2016, pp. 99-124.