The Lords Of Discipline Analysis

Though the novels Old School by Tobias Wolff and The Lords of Discipline by Pat Conroy each portray a young male narrator’s experience at all-male, private schools in the 1960s, the two schools they portray are of entirely different natures. The unnamed school in Old School is an academically focused, small, liberal-arts style college preparatory school in the northeast while the Carolina Military Institute of The Lords of Discipline is a rugged, military based school in Charleston, South Carolina. These obvious differences between the two schools create social environments of opposite extremes: the unnamed school in Old School fosters an environment of individual isolation through competition, while the Institute uses fear to create an environment …show more content…
Most of the students willingly place themselves into this system because of the reputation of the school and its graduates, and many of the students came with the goal of “[becoming] Institute men… to turn into exact images of the cadre who [abuses them]” (176). Through the enforced cruelty of the plebe system, the students at the Institute are forced to conform to a state of obedience and loyalty to their classmates to survive the pressure placed upon them by the cadre. As they suffer together and turn to each other for mental and physical support, they form incredibly strong social and emotional bonds as they all fight to overcome the plebe system to be recognized as ‘strong’ men of ‘iron will’ that have survived and graduated form the acclaimed Institute. However, this group bonding is taken to an unhealthy level as the surviving students begin to loose their individuality. As the narrator, Will McLean, progresses through the plebe system he watches as “the plebe system [destroys] the ability or desire of the freshmen to use the word “I’”(177), and realizes that “the Institute was a universe in love with the first person plural, the shout of the uniformed mob” (177). As the students loose …show more content…
Each of the two schools is able to create and continue an extreme social atmosphere because they are private schools insulated from the rest of the world around them, allowing them to create substitute realities that influence the behavior among their students. The world created by the school in Old School is described as a ‘dreamlike bubble’ that denies the reality of the world both outside and the dangers of the environment within its walls, while the Institute is described as inflicting a ‘schizophrenia’ on its students that causes them to loose sight of themselves and their values as they fall into the Institute’s system. These words, ‘dreamlike” and schizophrenia”, each used by the narrators of each novel to describe their experiences at their respective schools, capture the distinct separation and unreality of the environments behind the walls of the two institutions; an unreality that enables and perpetuates the characteristic environments of the schools among each generation of their