Authority, Obedience and Education
Chapter from the book:
Baltacı,
Ö.
(ed.)
2023.
Current Research in Education- II.
Synopsis
In this article, we will discuss the concepts of authority and obedience, which are strongly emphasized in the field of social psychology, and the position of obedience and authority in education. Drawing from the experiments of important social psychologists such as Stanley Milgram, Solomon Asch, and Muzaffer Sherif, we will first focus on authority, secondly on obedience, thirdly on the reasons for obedience to authority, and finally on how the education system instills authority and tries to promote obedience in students. We will also see that individuals educated within this system have no difficulty in obeying authority, and that they deprive themselves of critical thinking, questioning, and even their own individuality. We will highlight how the education system, which aims to produce competent individuals in every sense, paradoxically undermines this goal and contributes to the contradiction within itself. Furthermore, we argue that the education system fosters the idea of molding students to be obedient to authoritarian forces and, so to speak, domesticating them. We aim to explain how this education is delivered by drawing from important experiments in the field of social psychology.