Lots of feelings about school have been flowing around due to school starting back up and other circumstances in students’ lives.
As the first day of school approaches, students begin stressing about school and question whether or not they are going to do well on a test, or if they are going to miserably fail and not move to the next grade.
Not only do students start questioning themselves but they also question school in general.
They wonder things like how am I ever going to use this in the real world? Or what’s the point of learning this if I’m going to forget it in a few months anyway?
Some students love school and some students despise it.
Others think it’s useful, while others think it’s pointless.
The question is, why do these viewpoints vary so differently from each other and what are the arguments for both sides?
I don’t think we could ever truly know why some kids hate school and why some kids love it.
Maybe it’s genetic, maybe it’s just based on your youth years, who knows.
I will be giving my opinion on school and which side of the argument I’m on.
Bluntly speaking, I despise school.
I wake up every morning with dread of arriving.
If it wasn’t for the high-quality students and faculty at school it would be miserable every second of the day.
Let’s start with how pointless eighty percent of the material we are taught is.
I’m not saying that everything is useless but there is a majority of material that you will never use after high school.
Here are a couple of examples such as Math and Biology where most of the stuff you learn is time and energy wasted.
Take math as an example.
Everyone knows that it is important to learn addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, etc. However, these are all things we learned in elementary school.
Using a personal example, I learned about triangles and other shapes in math as well as how to find the degrees of an angle or how to use trigonometry last year.
These are all things I forgot about by the end of summer.
They don’t help me in any way shape or form in the real world.
Should I look at a piece of pizza and decide which angle to eat it from?
It is just pointless material that you don’t use unless you’re a mathematician.
Once again this all isn’t necessarily useless, it just depends on what field you go into.
For instance, if you are a construction worker you might have to use these skills to figure out a certain measurement which is understandable but this stuff should all be taught in trade school if that’s the case.
I shouldn’t have to waste my time and energy learning something I’m not gonna ever use.
Biology has basically the same idea but differs a bit.
In biology last year, we learned about plant biology and how to classify different plants in one of our units.
Although I won’t need this information in the real world, unless I want to look at a plant and say that it is a monocot or dicot.
It’s not completely useless but it’s just not practical to use in the real world and that is honestly what most of biology is.
My point is that it is all useless information to the average person.
In fact, the average adult only retains 10% of the knowledge learned in school.
In order to remember things we need to use we must repeat it.
So, that’s why we don’t remember what we learn.
Maybe you want to become a chef, therefore trigonometry would not be the most helpful for you. Meaning it would probably be discarded out of your brain.
This doesn’t mean it’s not interesting or cool, it is just not useful.
School doesn’t have to be pointless or a waste of time or energy.
School should just teach us practical things that we will use in the future.
For example, teach us how to pay bills.
If I come out of school being able to find an angle of a triangle or classify a plant but don’t know how to pay bills then that is a big problem.
Schools should teach us things like how to pay bills, how to do our taxes, how to survive as an adult.
I turn eighteen years old next year and I feel like a bird getting thrown out of its nest without learning how to fly.
School should teach us how to fly.
There’s no point in teaching a bird if it doesn’t know how to leave its nest.
My point is school should teach us how to live and not teach us just to keep us in school so they can keep getting money and deem Americans as somewhat “smart”.
Street smarts are far more important than school smarts.
Even in the past my teachers have told us right before learning a new topic that we will never use this in the real world and they are just forced to teach us it.
I believe colleges are a decent example of what school should be like.
When you go to college you choose to study something specific such as law, med, or arts.
You learn stuff that is gonna help you in your career and life in general.
When you go to law school you learn about the law because you absolutely need to be an expert in it and knowledgeable about the topic so you can be better prepared for your lifelong career.
In law school you don’t learn about who invented evolution because that is pointless information and something that you will not use in your law career.
Same with doctors they learn about the human body and how to heal it because that’s what they specialize in.
They don’t learn pointless things.
“I wouldn’t learn as much,” Maddie Chappel, Sophomore at Lakeland High School (LHS), said.
I understand peoples worries but you would still learn just not to be a jack of all trades and instead a master of a trade.
Personally, if I had a say in things I would get rid of the normal high school curriculum and instead pretty much have an early college.
It would pretty much be like trade school which is what I think we needIf we spent the four years of high school studying exactly what we want to do in the future, people would be so much better at their jobs.
Without trying to sound like a broken record, I just wish we would all come out of high school and not have it feel like a waste of time.
Teach us how to live life, not live in a classroom.