a message to the education system
How is school? You expect me to smile and tell you it’s great. And usually that’s exactly what I do. I wouldn’t be taken seriously if I was honest, because I’m too young to be stressed. I’m too young to be physically exhausted. I’m too young to have bags under my eyes that makeup can cover but can’t remove. I’m too young to be under this much pressure. Yet here I am. If you want an honest answer, then listen attentively. Listen with an open mind. Listen with understanding.
School is waking up at six o’clock every morning to get ready. Always feeling tired no matter how much sleep I get. Drinking two cups of coffee to avoid crawling back into bed. Rushing out the door so I have time to stop and get more coffee that I can barely afford just to keep my eyes open. School is sitting in classrooms for an hour and forty-five minutes at a time learning things that I will never need. How do you pay taxes? I couldn’t tell you. How does credit work? I’m not sure. But I can solve a quadratic equation, or I can identify the molarity of a substance because I’ve spent hours trying to understand pointless information rather than learning how to be a functioning member of society.
School is coming home after six hours of doing classwork just to do three to six hours of homework. Maybe more if you’re in honors or A.P. classes. You ask why I don’t just take easier classes. It’s because I’m not just expected to have good grades, I’m expected to get good grades in hard classes. Because school is a competition. It’s a competition to have the best GPA. It is a competition to look the best on paper. I am not a human in the education system, I’m a GPA, I’m a number, I’m a statistic. Freshman year I was a 4.0 walking eagerly through the halls, then sophomore year I was a 4.0 with a smile that had faded from exhaustion. I was a 4.0 running on 2 hours of sleep if I was lucky. I was a 4.0 who never spent time with my friends or family because I had too much homework. I didn’t even know why I was doing it. I just knew that I was ‘supposed to’.
What is school? It is being told what I am ‘supposed to do’. I am not old enough to come and go as I please. I am supposed to ask to go to the bathroom. However, I’m old enough to be expected to have the rest of my life planned out. I’m old enough to have all of this stress put on me, but I’m not old enough to be stressed. What is stress? Stress is leaving school after being there for six and a half hours, and going straight to a part time job for five more hours, and then coming home to a pile of homework and having to choose between sleep or my grades. School is having to choose between my own physical and mental health or my grades. Enjoy high school you say to me, you only get to do it once. When do I get to enjoy it? When I’m done with the work that keeps stacking up like bricks? You ask why I don’t quit my job. My job is not the problem. At work I’m treated like an adult. At work I learn actual life skills. I earn money in order to be independent. I pay my insurance, I fill my gas tank, I buy my clothes, and my school supplies, but I am not old enough to be stressed.
School is exhaustion. It is the sleepless nights spent doing busy work that won’t benefit your life in the long run. You ask why I don’t drop out. I wouldn’t know what else to do. School is the only thing I know. We are put in the education system as children and not given other options. We are told that you have to do well in high school, to go to a good college, to have a good future. That is ‘the plan’ that we are fed as children.
The school system has one plan that is expected to work for millions of students. Yet half of us don’t have a plan of our own. We are spending thousands of dollars, taking out student loans, acquiring student debt, and half of us don’t know what we’re working towards, because we are constantly changing, and what we want changes with us.
School is anxiety. We are taught to memorize not to learn. In the real world we can use resources, we can talk to our peers, and we can use the internet, so why can’t we do that during tests? Instead we are isolated, and tested on how well we memorized the information, because that’s just how it’s always been. The world has changed dramatically in the past few decades and the only thing that has changed in schools are the lunches. All of the stress and anxiety of tests are just more grades in the system, and all the information we were supposed to ‘learn’ is forgotten the minute we hand in our tests.
I have learned to strive in this system, and so have many others, but we shouldn’t have to. I don’t want my children to have to choose between sleep or their algebra homework. I don’t want my children to be running on empty throughout high school. I want them to look back on their education and remember learning the information in class, not memorizing the information at two in the morning in their bedrooms. I want my children to have time to spend with their friends. I want my children to have time to do the things that they love. I want my children to have time. How was school? I’ll ask. And they’ll smile and tell me it’s fine, because they’re too young to be stressed.
