Trained to Follow Instructions
Its never too late to start thinking for yourself
When I started teaching ethics to undergrads, I saw how “shut down” young people can be and what they say to themselves to make it seem OK to have no agency. This takes practice, and the institutional setting of the American educational system — complete with metal detectors and security guards in urban schools — is the best teacher.
My students were from Washington, DC, mostly the products of overwhelmed urban high schools. They were smart, but they had become accustomed to being bored in class, to having distracted, overworked instructors explain material they themselves felt disconnected from — whatever they were required to teach — to large groups of students many of whom could not participate in any discussion or manage themselves at all. There was no time or space for thinking. This was an exercise in getting standards met. Answers were right or wrong. Students tried to guess the right answer so that the class would end. When the bell rang, everyone bolted.
I would write Sartre’s famous claim on the whiteboard:
“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”
“What is Sartre saying here?” I would ask, “because it matters for your life if he is right or wrong.” I would ask students to put their chairs in a circle so that we could discuss it together. My students would object. They would say they didn’t understand the point. They would say it was a silly thing to discuss. One actually said: “I feel uncomfortable talking to people and looking at them. I’m not doing this.” I said it was uncomfortable, and vulnerable, to talk about important ideas, and we were going to do it anyway. Finally, one student would offer something precious — her own interpretation — usually tentatively: “I feel like when we chose whether to go to college we were using our freedom. Maybe we are using it in this discussion right now. But it doesn’t seem like we’ve been free to choose everything. I had a heart problem when I was little, and I know I didn’t choose that.”
Now we were talking. Now thinking was happening.
Taking control of your part in the action is the beginning of stepping out of the passive space of someone who is acted upon and stepping into the active space of agency. In a society like ours where agency has so many benefits and rewards, we should be trained to do this from the start, but not all of us are. Many of my students were not. They needed to learn to trust themselves, to communicate with each other, and to allow their ideas to be subject to critique in a disciplined and rigorous way. All of this was an institutional failing, not a personal failing. They had been trained to think of their behavior mainly as compliant or not, but not as engaged at the level of their ideas, and they had internalized a message. This happens to all of us, particularly if disciplinary mechanisms are consistent enough. It can happen when we think we are immune.
Foucault described the modern prison as a surveillance mechanism that turned subjects into objects simply by creating the possibility of constant surveillance, without the subject of surveillance knowing when exactly they were being watched. If you come to believe that your behavior is being monitored, then whether it is or not, you will monitor yourself. Our divisive political climate functions in this sort of way. Are you with us or against us? This is always a question. You monitor your statements without even being told to.
In such environments, you may cease thinking of yourself as a subject, and start thinking of yourself as an object. This is a subtle and insidious process, and works beyond prisons.
“He is seen, but he does not see; he is an object of information, never a subject in communication.”
In the U.S. it is even more insidious because we appear to take “individuality” so seriously. And indeed we do take it seriously in one way, but not in the way that matters. By treating children as though all of their preferences and interests and feelings matter, we behave as though they are agents when they are not yet. This means we do not train them properly. In this way our “respect for individuality” deprives people of the help they need to become someone worth being. Agency is an achievement born of education and the struggle of each person to align their actions with their values — not a birthright, and not a given. It must be built. Young people need our help with this. We all need help with this. We need critique and serious discussion of consequences, and all the rest. We need to see that achieving ever greater integrity matters. The world needs us each working on ourselves.
Not playing the game of treating yourself as an object is the beginning of thinking and individual agency for each person who decides to take up the challenge. Trusting your own thinking and interrogating yourself — getting first to what you think is right before investing in a conversation with another person — is a good practice if you are serious about this.
A lot of people don’t really ask themselves what they think. Educational institutions may have encouraged this, and workplaces may reinforce it. Leisure time spent with screens in hand can only add to the sense of sleepwalking that a human being may experience as they try to find their way.
Walking into the workplace of the most compromised organization I ever saw — the one that cured me of my naiveté about the extent of cultural dysfunction that people will accept and defend — was a place where employees had been so beaten down from thinking for themselves that one had a sign at her desk that said “Bang head here.” She didn’t think to take it down when she met her new boss. This was the culture. When I asked why the organization even existed, employees said they really didn’t know, then proceeded to answer the practical question, not the purpose question. “It seems like whatever we do or don’t do, there’s enough money in the bank so it can run for quite a while.” I soon learned that customers were tied to the mast as well as employees; opting out was not an option if they wanted to maintain their livelihoods. Now it all made sense. There is no need for purpose when you are a prisoner.
“To induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.”
In environments like this, it is easy to drive thinking away permanently. Simply respond negatively to any idea or plan to improve things, and you will effectively kill any seeds of innovation that blow in the window by accident. Agency itself is being disabled as one person at a time “accepts their lot” and acquiesces to passivity.
How do we protect ourselves from these environments, and notice the less extreme versions of them? How do we inoculate ourselves from the objectification that is peculiarly common in a society that prides itself on individualism?
One simple strategy is to insist on individual thought in your own head, based on disciplines you identify and validate. There is a form of self-management that says: “I will behave as an agent as often as possible. I will be responsible for myself.” Being responsible for yourself means adopting standards for yourself that are high enough to show you that you are taking this project — the project of becoming independent — seriously. Standards may include doing what you say you are going to do, telling the truth, researching information to validate or invalidate your beliefs. This is the work of developing your agency that starts with your commitment to thinking independently.
We live in a culture in which superficial individuality can masquerade as agency. Superficial individuality lives very easily amidst the disciplining of low expectations, the training we get to be small and unthinking, such as happens in institutions and workplaces. We risk becoming content with individuality without depth. Such people are caricatures of individuals more than individuals, trying on what might make them seem different without conviction — or with all the unthinking conviction of a fool. The stream of uninformed political opinions, opinions about celebrities, the relentless pursuit of fashions and trends — all of it passing itself off as “individuality” — this is the final blow to the genuine achievement of agency if you mistake it for an accomplishment or what matters most.
The first step is to see it. The second step is to decide to be different. The third is to do something about it.
Be an agent, not a victim, not an object. That student who finally spoke up in the circle — tentatively, honestly, offering her own thought for the first time — she was already doing it. So can you. There are many people who are finding their way. Pick one to emulate and begin taking yourself more seriously.
Cindy
Thank you Cindy for another excellent article. My career in education was centred on students with disabilities, physical and/or intellectual, and my daughter was herself one of my students. My aims very much included encouragement and strategies to achieve as high a degree of independence as possible, both in thought and action, while also giving weight to interdependence and teamwork. My daughter, by the age of 23, had her own apartment, a job she enjoyed, hobbies, a buzzing social life, and was able to travel independently on public transport - all of which were deemed almost impossible by “experts”. Several other parents felt encouraged to pursue similar goals for their young people with special needs. We all have untapped potential and it has been the joy of my life to see the way our children and students can blossom and become fully engaged in a meaningful adult life, with agency, and taken seriously by the powers that be, never infantilised.
From a clinical and ethical perspective, what you describe illustrates a common pattern: environments that reward compliance tend to diminish agency. In both education and healthcare, individuals internalise surveillance, anticipate judgment, and begin to pre‑edit their own thoughts. This is not a personal flaw but a natural adaptation to systems that regard people as objects to be managed rather than as subjects capable of reflection. Ethically, autonomy is developmental rather than automatic. It relies on conditions that foster value clarification, truth‑telling, and active participation in one’s own reasoning. When a student tentatively offers an interpretation, it mirrors the patient starting to speak in their own voice a shift from passivity towards agency. Your observation that contemporary “individuality” can conceal a lack of true agency is especially significant. Expression without reflection does not equate to autonomy. Reclaiming agency begins with disciplined independent thinking and a willingness to engage as a subject rather than an object, and it is supported by practices and communities that honour this stance.