Education, Learning, and School. The curiosities formed by what I see to be wrong in the Educational system.

If you were to be as curious enough to look up the definition of the word “education” in an English dictionary, you would find what you read to be a tad bit different to what you originally thought the definition of education is. One definition that might open your eyes is, “the process of giving or receiving systematic instruction, especially at a school or university”. I’m sure the two words that caught your eye were, “systematic” and “instruction” and hey, they caught mine too, and I will address my thoughts on that briefly. However the thing that disappoints me worse about our definition of education is what is missing from the definition. What about knowledge, what about fulfillment of ones curiosity? What about individuality and individual interest? By my own and hopefully not my own common sense, should these be a more accurate, or “correct” vision on what education should be? Or perhaps I’m speaking to myself here. Let’s rewind to the things I found atrocious that were included in our current definition of what we call, “education”. Excuse my language, but “systematic instruction”? What? You mean the process of instructing a large enough group of peers that it’s considered systematic? Or I am I just twisting words here? You mean to tell me that receiving instruction and fulfilling it up to your all mighty instructors standards is what we call, “learning” or making you smarter in the least bit of way? You mean to tell me that no one in the large pool of their peers is focused on individually enough so they’re “systematically” taught and attended to their needs to succeed in what is an already a broken “education” atmosphere? To me, the last thing that would ever define intelligence is being “instructed” on what others of a higher authority in the food chain of life apparently know so much about. Doesn’t that make you vulnerable in to what they want you to know, and at the same time don’t want you to know? Or are you going to contradict what they think, tell yourself what to believe or know as a fact contradictory to our or instruction and still become a success in their “education” system, and then make a success out of your life you value so much? The answer is a fat no. To me less intelligent people automatically cling to what they believe to be portrayed as authorities that are smarter than all of us either convey to us or instruct us to do. Intelligent people in my book, believe to what they think has reason, evidence and true belief in what they think is true, even if it is contradictory to what your teacher, or should I say “instructor” tells you to believe. I’m not trying to say that everything that you may have learned in school is wrong, there are some concrete facts of course, but who’s the one to change the ones that you may find wrong, useless, or outdated? With this question I will segway you to my next sub topic in this discussion about education, the curriculum. Now, as a senior high school student I know for a fact I’m not the only one who has sat a desk and thought to myself in a depleting matter “how is what my teacher is teaching me ever going to be useful in my life as a successful human being on this planet?” The truth is this, yes, sometimes if not more often than not, you will come across concepts that you know for a certain fact will provide with you no service as a human being, or sometimes even the path you want to take in order to be successful in life. In fact you may find the time you’re wasting on that concept to actually be a disservice because of the time you’re wasting that should be spent on what you believe to be useful to your self, and respectfully so. Sometimes you will say the same thing about concepts that may seem to you as a student, just as useless. With this being said, I think we can all learn from past experiences in our lives, that although some things may seem dumb, irrelevant, and useless in your life, with the right situation down the road, you may discover whether it would be days, weeks, months, years, decades, or even an entire lifetime, to be a valuable lesson. You develop your own conservative view on what was taught to you, from experience. The third category I can address to the curriculum, is the information, although still not close to conveyed the right way to students, is actually useful. With addressing these three categories I hope to have given credit to the curriculum where credit is do, while at the same time, pointing out the flaws as well. However this whole time I’ve been breaking down the actual problem I’m trying to desperately address here, and that is the curriculum itself. Besides the fact that was already shared by me about the some of the curriculum having it be a standard to learn things that are completely useless to you and waste your precious time, the problem is that there is even a curriculum itself. With the curriculum comes with every required subject a syllabus. A syllabus can basically be explained as, “a list of things that must be taught or should I say, systematically instructed, and learned by students by the time the course has completed it’s process. This causes many problems. A major one being your instructor may have no other choice but to rush you and your peers through lessons in the course, which may cause you to not fully understand or just not have the time to understand and grasp if you did have the time. Why the rush? The rush being a problem also explains the problem of sometimes more often than not, too many lessons are jam packed in the syllabus in such a short amount of time. If you wanted to learn geometry on your own, would you honestly say to your self, “the best way to learn and understand geometry is to try to learn and complete assignments, tests, and quizzes, on 14 chapters in a little under 4 1/2 months? Also at the same time the five other subjects you could be trying to do the same thing in? I’ll let you find that answer yourself. With this kind of system, are we doing nothing but asking for education malpractice? Even if you do as a student score well on everything you’ve had to cover in such a short amount of time, who says you’re even going to remember it going into the next semester? Let alone take it with you and use it to your advantage in life. After all, like I mentioned before, all this information being involuntarily crammed in your not even fully developed brain, is “systematically instructed” but systematically tested. Which leads me in to the next subtopic, grades and motivation. Let’s take a look at the every day life of a student. This will seem redundant to what you most likely already know, because you as a student yourself may experience the same thing everyday. You wake up, if the moon hasn’t just vanished from the sky, then its still there. Either its still black as night out, or the light before the sun rises has just barley broken the barrier to find it self to your eye, resulting in a light purple to dark pink color in the sky. Science itself says, that depending on your daily/nightly functions your sleep schedule and times of wakefulness will vary from person to person. However, science and research also proves that when most people reach adolescence they experience what can be called a sleep delay, causing them to be more alert at night, and rarely fall asleep before 11:00pm. I know I’m not the only teenager that knows what I’m talking about, but has experienced it first hand. This causes you to lose your x amount of hours of sleep you need for your brain and body to function properly in combination of the obnoxiously early time for school to start. With that being said scientific research also says your brain didn’t function at that ridiculous time in the morning anyway! Haven’t you experienced it yourself as a student? Let alone have little to any motivation for you to get out of bed, let alone get yourself and attend a school full of the overwhelming academic standards and a lot of your peers if not all feeling the same way as you do. Heck, sometimes in good ole’ Swartz Creek it can get even harder with the cold! Sometimes temperatures dip to -20 degrees farenheight below 0! Since that doesn’t cancel school sometimes just for the unfortunate students who weren’t lucky enough to be blessed with their own car or bus route, or parent available to drive to school, have the cruel, saddening task of walking to school. A bit touchy but I myself get a considerably upset for those students. I mean just getting to school walking in a -20 wind chill should be an accomplishment in your day. I myself as a student at SCHS entering the doors from the student parking lot because I personally drive myself to school see students with either their nostrils literally formed in to a mucus ice sickles, or tears on their cheeks frozen (most likely from having to face the wind in an already polar climate on their hard agonizing walk) when I choose to hold the door for behind me. Going on an Alaskan journey to school. The saddest part is, most of those students had truly no say on whether they had to walk that walk. If you are under the age of a minor, it is MANDATORY you attend school. One person that can prevent a mandatory walk to a place (through which hopefully if you read further find out is corrupt) sometimes more often than not doesn’t cancel school. I personally have had my own objections to the super intendent’s poor and inconsiderate decisions on whether its too cold for school or not. I know the best way was to let someone in authority know is to respectfully voice my opinion to the people who actually had their part in the system. One example being one morning when I awoke to the pitch black sky seen through my window, I checked my smart phone for the temperature it read -19 degrees farenheight below 0. The main roads when I drove out to school that day being coated in snow as well. I found this preposterous, that the decision made had 0 consideration to the less fortunate students I mentioned earlier and a bunch of others. So I took it in my own hands to voice my opinion politely. I called the administration office to an answer of a kind hearted lady who replied to my complaint of everything mentioned above with the words of” I reassure you everything is fine our superintended observed the conditions at 4 am this morning he says its fine out there.” After that the urge to not crack up at the stupidity of the situation itself, I told the kind office lady to have a nice day and hung up the phone. I carried on with my day. The question I’m trying to point out is, if school and learning is so valuable (which it can be, and my opinion should be) then why was this whole routine for me as a student, with every aspect I’ve mentioned before like the depriving of self thought, attention, overloading and a lot of times useless curriculum and syllabus, waking up inhumanely early, being amongst people who are on the same level of naturally induced levels of low effort, designed for me as a student to have every last drop of motivation sucked out of me? Don’t you think it should be the other way around? An analogy you might find accurate is an Egyptian slave with a constant whip or spear held to his or her back physically forcing you to carry things that are too heavy for your body to handle up a long inclined plane, where you see your fellow slaves carrying the same exact thing on their back (reference to “systematical Instructing”) in to something bigger that you all posses a small, identical piece of. The topic of grades is a funny one to say the least. Along with school being mandatory, grades also defeat their own purpose in a few ways. One way grades aren’t right in accommodation with the mandatory school system is that instead of strengthen a students motivation, they only contradict themselves. A students shouldn’t receive grades in what he or she is not interested in learning in. Along with that, if you’re truly a student that has a passion to learn, you would realize grades are the last thing you would care about, because the motivation is already with in you. If the common objective is to truly learn then “grades” would not be a true measurement of what you learn. Progress in knowledge would be. Not to mention with grades, it is not a universal way to measure EVERYBODY’S style of learning, especially with school being mandatory of tracking how much you’ve truly learned or had the motivation to learn. They’re just numbers that are based off percentages of how much of the “systematical instruction” you remember. Some students if not a lot to most, simply don’t accommodate on focusing on things that they feel don’t fill their true knowledge, or don’t help them in life, or just don’t find remotely interesting at all. Ask me first hand. The second my English teacher starts mentioning anything regarding medieval play, my headphones go straight in and my music to the highest volume. A disclaimer being that said play doesn’t have any valuable lessons, but if any none that spark my interest, and if any did spark my interest then, you most likely don’t need to read a play to find them out, let alone get a bunch of answers wrong regarding what color Romeos mustache was in the play “Romeo & Juliet”. Because if I don’t know that, I must obviously to my English teacher come off as a pretty stupid kid won’t I? With the grim reality we inhabit I just explained, I will now explain to you it’s opposite. You wake up, you still have an alarm, the school can not accommodate a whole student body’s sleep schedule on an individual basis. However there is a reasonable time where you wake up. The sun is shining, you feel restored after a full nights sleep. The school you attend to, values you as an individual student. Your thoughts ideas, and curiosities are helped manifested by your teacher. Your peers are just as motivated as you are. Instead of school being mandatory, its the people who want to learn and take joy in it who fill the desks. Concrete concepts are still taught to you, but in a more compressible style that accommodates your learning the material, but letting you actually utilize it later in life instead of forgetting it after your exams. You don’t do it for the grades, you do it for whole reason of why school was invented in the first place! A place to learn. You actually find school to not be just a great place to you, but one of your favorite places. Why is the way everything now is set up for us to fail? Questions that may arise from you are “Who in the right mind would set things up for us to fail and why?” “Why aren’t things set up the opposite of what’s right? “What would things be like if thinks were actually straight forward?” “Maybe this whole set up of leading and school is like this for a greater reason someone else know or a reason we simply can’t understand?” Those questions and others you have had came up with on your own, are what I will leave you with being the fruits of my writing. Hopefully the answers to these questions which you may or may not find become the fruits of your curiosity. Thank you for reading. -Neek