HW 39: First School Assignment

Questions

• Should education be optional? Is it fair that opportunity is given and measured by how many years you've attended school and how many degrees you have?
• Does school limit or liberate your thinking?
• Is the government more of a parent to us than our own parents are?
  

Ideas

• School puts so much unnecessary pressure on students (ie. SATs) that we, both students and parents become so obsessed with the idea of being academically perfect that we are blinded from a larger sense of purpose
• School has created the illusion that a high GPA = a successful future. This road to success has been put up onto such a high pedestal that a lot of people have failed to recognize that there are many other ways to achieve your dreams. It's not all about book smart.
• Everything's a competition. In school, we compete against other students. At work, we compete for promotions. Collectively, as a nation, we compete against other nations. Education = money = power and dominance, therefore school is sort of like a military training camp. Instead of fighting a physical war, we're trained to fight financially and economically.
  

Experiences

• I feel like school occupies too much of my life. There's always too much information being crammed into my head and it gets so hard to handle. When I do get information down though, I forget it once the unit is over.
• I used to always find at least one happy reason to come to school but now everyday feels like a drag.
• School encourages a lot of participation but I don't like talking aloud in class or presenting.
  

School can be seen in two of the extreme ways. One, it raises kids to become successful leaders of the future. Higher education usually equates to higher knowledge and intelligence. I don't think that's necessarily right though. School can only do so much. Some people have natural intelligence that others who have been to school for 20 years still can't achieve.

Two, like Vincent said, "It's a factory." It encourages kids to only achieve their dreams through their system. School is good in the way that it surrounds us with a diverse group of people with different ideas and opinions to offer. But I also feel like that cushions us more so than it liberates us. We are literally stuck with same group of people for years. We start to feel pressured into thinking, talking, and acting the way our peers do. This shuts us down from the potential person we could've been had it not for the box we've been cooped up in. So in a way, school does tend to create like-minded students.

Einstein used to be the worst student. He sucked in school but still he ended up being the world's greatest genius. This goes to show that thinking is something that we can learn on our own and doesn't need to be taught. Students usually end up thinking somewhat in the same way because they are taught by the same teacher and with the same ideas. But learning to think for yourself and figuring out what way suits you best aren't things that can be taught.