Education; Designed to Advance

The time it takes to complete daily tasks is consumed by assignments, papers, quizzes and tests. School is becoming less about learning what is important to us as students, but more about how much we can cram into our day in order to do well in the next class. If you desire to get good grades the amount of studying is preposterous, and for what? To get in to the next school in order to get a god job in order to make enough money to have a good life. But does having a good life mean? It is important to find your passion but when you are confused about what that is, it proves to be very difficult to not waste parts of your day. Mindlessly doing math in order to prepare for the quiz next week or analyzing data so that your lab is ready to hand in. It is understandable that we all have to start somewhere and that you need a basis of knowledge before you decide what you want to do with the rest of your life. However, it comes to a point where if you have matured enough, examined your options enough, done what you are told to enough, you are ready to make it to the next step.

After long examination of the demeanours of high school students in class, the conclusion has been drawn that many students are discontent with the classes and the material that they are learning. Most of what is taught in high school is not used post, simply ask parents and other middle age individuals. What matters in true life is not how well you can solve algebraic equations and plot them on the line, or how much information you can memorize for the test the week later. It is about balance of the mind and body, how to manage all of the obligations of life and move past them in order to deal with the next gruelling mindless step that is making us closer to “success”.

Learning is not the problem, education is not the problem but it is the simple organization of classes and life. How many courses in your school career do you actually remember the content to? I would guess not many. The courses that are about how much you learn rather the content of what you learn make for the retaining of information to be limited. If the only goal for a majority of students is to get as much information in simply to be able to spew the information back out into the world, are students really learning anything?

The discontent that students feel toward work load and the content of courses is linked towards burnout. We as individuals who put value into the work that we have to do, who care about the quality, and achieve what we were always told to be; “Be the best you can be!”, suffer from the overwhelming sensation of what can only be described as nothingness. This “nothingness” can be suddenly transformed into passion as soon as something clicks. We go from a lull to intense passion when we find what works for us. But, the lull that students are faced with on a day to day basis is often many hours long and spans for days or even weeks.

The lack of real life experiences that students have is what is making student act like drones, programmed to complete tasks designed by our superiors in order to aid us in the success of our life. But what is success? Is it determined by knowledge, power, money or the ability to fall in line? We are told that all humans are unique, we all have different abilities that help make our lives have meaning but, the constant engulfment of meaningless tasks that students have to succumb to, inhibits our ability to flourish uniquely. We all do the same things, stress about similar experiences, work towards an end goal that is designed to unknowingly appease the bystanders who so graciously sculpted us in to people meant for success.

The question here is, if not when you are a teenager figuring out your life are you able to start making real decisions regarding your path and desires, then is it when you are older and “able to make your own decisions” are you able to choose what you really want to do?

How many wasted hours in a day are there for us students to do what other people please, simply because they have some sort of authority over us?