The school I attended was a traditional primary school. My Monday-Friday schedule consisted of the following: four majors taught in one classroom, three of my best friends, two peanut butter sandwiches, one for me, one for the bully, and a grumpy teacher, who either always had a hangover, or went through a nasty divorce.
You see, the education system is rigged. It was designed in an extremely stereotypical way, where only a particular handful of students are likely to succeed in the “rat race” if desired.
Students who know how to play the game, i.e. be able to receive high marks on homework, scoring the best possible points on a test, etc., were and continue to be praised in the education system because everything is points-based, everything is based on alphabetical notes, and everything is based on knowing how to retrieve information for a short period of time, then spit it out on an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet.
I can go on and on about why the system favors a small portion of students over the majority, but everyone here already knows what I’m talking about, so I’d hate to bore my audience.
School is supposed to prepare you for the “real world,” and in the real world, we don’t get points for knowing the distance formula. We don’t get letter notes for how to draw a sine and cosine graph. And we are certainly not commended for making ourselves vulnerable by bringing our unique ideas into the classroom.
“Think outside the box” is nothing but an encouraging phrase. A dead concept.
The original intention of the school was to educate students, not to determine an individual’s intellect by the number of points a person can receive in a given period of time.
The original intention of the school was to establish a place of learning, a place where the student is allowed to challenge and question ideas, a place where students can excel without fear of “fail” or “be incorrect”.
The original intention of the school was to accept and allow creative freedom. To encourage someone to engage in new ideas and create new solutions to difficult problems.
Everyone excels at a different pace. That’s what sets me apart from Sally, Susan, Sarah and Sam. That’s what the education system didn’t take into consideration. The system only benefits people who participate in the “rat race”.
So putting into words the reality of how school actually failed me instead of teaching me was and is too difficult to express. So all I could say to my mother was “school was good”.
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