In the essay “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, Gloria Anzaldua in her subsection “Overcome the Tradition of Silence”, she introduces the issues coinciding with how people are silenced through language. Without being able to express our own opinions we have many problems in society with not being able to approve upon the problems we have. Ideas from certain people would be shut down simply because of their authority in society that they may be unable to control. This is rather evident in our own experiences and we have all been shut down at least once in our lives due to the American educational system.

When we are kids, and throughout our schooling, we are always taught to listen to the higher authority and not to question the decision making of the adults that are telling us a direction. Maybe it is to stop talking at lunch, or to walk in a certain way to get to your next class. Although we are unaware, this is a method that we are being taught that in certain scenarios, we should stop expressing ourselves in our own individual way. When we are taught to listen to any adult that is giving us direction, we are taught that our opinions as kids are less than them and our thoughts are less important than them.

In my life, I specifically deal with this mainly due to the limitations of my age. My parents do not believe many of the ideas I express, whether it is reasoned by their relations to the evidence I tell them on certain topics, or if it is due to their ideas on a certain topic because of their previous experiences. Many believe that due to the longer life experiences of the eldest, that they are the wisest, and this is the idea that we are taught to stand by in school and even in our own households. Are we just supposed to blindly follow the older generation’s ideas because their ideas worked twenty years before we were born? There would be no generation of customs, ideas, art, even math. If the founding fathers did not question the ideas being brought about by the English kingdom, America would not stand today as an individual country. Our experiences in modern day society should not be silenced due to the stereotypes brought upon the “rank” of our language or dialect or any background for that matter, and rather should be open to discussion so we can make the world push further towards creating new culture and ideas.