Adressing the Superficial Education System

I am a high-school student and I, just like most privileged people my age, am staring down at my clock at midnight, dishing out all my allowance on Starbucks’ coffee and Wi-Fi, and am most evidently clueless about my life ahead of me. It’s about time now that the Common-App becomes my homepage and the councilors office becomes a mecca for my grade, and as much as the prospect of college excites my very soul, there is a big part that irks me; these people around me, are losing sense and sight of what education truly is.

Nowadays, I find that the education system is really just that: a system. It’s the same information that the teachers have inscribed in their brains over the years, spit out onto the white boards and gulped down by the students eager for only one thing: to pass. With all this globalization and 30second fads and trends, materialism has penetrated through so many an organization that it has long defeated one of its more innocent victims, schools.

The purpose of education is to enrich the mind and achieve greater knowledge and wisdom about life and everything it offers, but how are we to achieve something like this when we are tested, and tested not about what we know, but, what we are ‘supposed’ to know. We are narrowing peoples capacities of creativity and individual thought by training them to believe things like what Darwin said is ‘true’ or what the Syllabus requires a ‘7-scoring’ artist to create. It’s little to never that a student is prompted to enlighten the class with what they know or is encouraged to pursue a knowledge quest before   they have a nice little group of letters spelling ‘PhD.’.

What is really irking me right now though , is that around college time, people jump on this new quest not for knowledge, but a quest to achievements. Don’t get me wrong, achieving things is great, in fact, it’s one of the best motivations to reach your goals, but please people, stop trying so hard for something that is SO. SUPERFICIAL. It not...