Peer pressure shapes society without a doubt, but does that make it a good thing? Definitely not. It makes students make changes within themselves without even realizing. Every student has their own unique mind, yet they still won’t wear what they truly want to so that they could fit in at school. There’s the obvious forms of pressure for students to do like drugs, drink, and vandalism but people forget that there’s more subtle ways. For example, trending styles or picking classes that everyone else is taking. 

A student is walking through school on the first day, wearing their new favorite shoes, then they start to see that everyone else is wearing the same “trendy” shoes. The student might start to feel insecure about how they dress or how their style is, therefore, they start to change their own unique style to be included with their classmates. There is nothing wrong with a student wanting to fit in but there is something wrong with them feeling like they have to fit in.

Every student at the end of the year starts to pick their classes for the upcoming school year. The majority of them will ask their friends what classes they’re taking so that the next year they might possibly have those classes together. The biggest things that students pick together are their extracurriculars, one student may not be interested in these specific classes but they’ll still choose them because their friends are. 

People may argue that forcing someone into doing something that might be good for them would make pressuring them okay. But it’s not. No matter what the situation is, the choice should be there, no one should ever feel guilt tripped or coerced into doing something they truly do not want to do, let them decide for themselves.

Being in a school environment automatically means that in some way they will eventually experience peer pressure, but that doesn’t mean someone should be harassing someone to change just because they didn’t like the way they dressed or the classes they picked. Students have a choice to be themselves and no one should try to change that.