Conformity And Culture

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Does conformity hurt a culture? I would argue that when it comes to academics and business, conformity helps. In school, this is obvious. If you are in a classroom with 50 other students, every student is expected to know that 2 + 2 = 4. Sure, this is a simple example, but the academic system is usually based upon reaching a solution that someone else (the textbook, your teacher, the government, etc) wants you to reach. Further, the extremely competitive nature of academia in China has parents encouraging this behavior, even outside the structures of academia (no, I am not suggesting that 2 + 2 does not equal 4, nor that you should tell your teacher so to be unique, just that conformity can travel beyond the walls of a school). Academic stress happens in America too, I just feel like it is more ubiquitous in China. What about in business? This too has some benefits. Think about a production line in China, cranking out iPod after iPod, all made to be the exact same, with the outliers and the bad production techniques tweaked to remove these expensively bad units. The faster each unit can be made the same, the cheaper that unit will be, and the happier the company selling it will be. The concept was created in the wake of World War 2, when the Japanese began to focus heavily on quality control; today, the Chinese benefit from these methods of conformity. So business and school both seem to be havens for conformity. But what about situations that require some ingenuity? What happens when the product that is made so fast and becomes so cheap and ubiquitous that the public is clamoring for a newer and shinier device? (an iPhone instead of an iPod, for example) Who will create the technology that will drive the next revolution? What about when there are students that rise to the top of their class and go on to get a PhD? What happens when the smartest student goes

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