Have you ever written passionately about something you care about, and then been sort of disappointed in the final product? In a vicarious way, that’s how I feel about Jeff Schmidt’s book Disciplined Minds (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).

Disciplined Minds is about the negative consequences of socialization – that is, how we learn to fit into our social groups, organizations, schools, and so on. Schmidt focuses in particular on the conformity required by all of the white-collar professional disciplines, and stresses that “discipline” implies both specialized knowledge and acceptance of professional norms that are essentially political. Continue Reading

I taught a freshman seminar called The Psychology of Violence and Nonviolence for many years. It touched on such topics as aggression, conflict, mediation, and movements of nonviolent social change such as the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. By the second week of each semester, I was invariably approached by students who were dismayed to discover how unfamiliar they were with this important material.

After learning about the Nashville sit-ins of 1960, which broke the icy rigidity of the Jim Crow era and began the process of desegregation in that city, a student named Rachel wrote in her reaction paper: “I cannot believe that I did not learn about this in high school. I feel like this is an injustice to me.”

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