The Fault In Our Educational System

I have been a student for as long as I have been alive. From the time of my birth until now and forever. I was taught how to walk, talk, read, and ride a bike as a student to my parents, and later a preschool student, an elementary school student, a middle school student, and currently a high school student. But most importantly, I am a student of society, a student of the earth, a student of the universe. We all are essentially. We force ourselves out of bed five days a week for the purpose of the sweet, invaluable brain candy in mind that is education. We fill our minds, we began to understand the way of the world, the way of life, the way of the human. It's astounding information we begin to accumulate and dissect through every question, and thought. It's amusing and rightfully so. Through education comes self-actualization. Which is at the top of Maslow's hierarchy of human needs. It is a basic psychological need and can provide the key to happiness and fulfillment. We all know this however, but what we do not know is how to facilitate and function this education properly in a student-effective way.

You see, we live in a world where our educational culture revolves around meaningless numbers that supposedly measure a student's intelligence. In lieu of real and accurate student- focused measure of understanding that encompasses all areas of student-progress. You, as a student, are defined by your grades and your GPA, and only they determine your worth and nothing else. In the race for the best education, the best spot in a highly prestigious university, we, as students, are pitted against each other, in constant competition with each other, with ourselves, and the system itself. This barrier created by these assigned numbers to one's value of mind is at the root of the many problems the educational system faces today. We have put a price tag to our brains in which we have come to derive our self worth and confidence from. A price tag we must live up to.. Or else.. Imminent failure, you are forgotten, perceived as nothing but worth a mere speck of dust, another unimportant application tossed aside on a college admissions counselor's desk.

We have conditioned ourselves, as students to believe this, to concede to such a system of education and in turn, it has affected the way we think about ourselves and our self-worth. We are plagued by excruciating self-criticality and stress. It's a true epidemic on our hands. As researchers at the University of California - Irvine have discovered, "Short-term stress lasting as little as a few hours or as long as weeks or months can impair brain-cell communication in areas associated with learning and memory." this in turn proves that system in which we have been so blindly enforcing proves to be extremely flawed and counterproductive in that it does not provide a very efficient learning environment. Instead of catering to its students it does the opposite by polluting the students educational and in turn, mental and emotional space with unnecessary stress.

Learning isn't just about learning anymore. It's about the pressure and the competitiveness of cramming in as much information in our heads and trying to come out on top in a limited period of time. These numbers have created false superiority and inferiority complexes within schools. For example, Students who take higher level classes and receive higher grades and GPAs believe that they are somehow superior to other students who take general level classes and receive average grades, who then also think of themselves in the same way they are thought of by their "higher-level" peers. In thinking that they fall short of being smart enough and good enough and capable enough . When in reality, no one is really superior to the other, as all of us are allowing ourselves to fall victim to the system, which has detrimental effects on how we perceive ourselves and others. It's a construct we have created for ourselves in the goal pursuance of time-efficacy and easily sorting out graduation eligibility with no consideration of foresight to the student, teacher, and thus future wellbeing of humanity itself.

Teachers are expected to teach for the grades and students are to learn for such. Rather than cultivating a system which encourages a robustness and livelihood of creativity as opposed choking it out, the system in which we live now has cultivated a great deal of mental health complications amongst the nation's vast student body. A study appearing in the American Psychological Association's (APA) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology proves that anxiety has increased so much that typical schoolchildren during the 1980's reported more anxiety than child psychiatric patients did during the 1950's. This number only continues to sky rocket at an alarmingly increasing rate. Another study suggests that In 2016, nearly two-thirds of college students reported "overwhelming anxiety," up from 50 percent just five years earlier, according to the National College Health Assessment. This overwhelming anxiety can display itself through its effect on a students test taking skills, retainment and recall of information, concentration, and even the overall health of a student.

It's true that in the future robots will be running the world, walking around everywhere, as common as the air we breathe, but not the artificial metal-made computer-programmed robots you are thinking of, no, we will be the robots. Mentally and emotionally unstable robots, and the future is already here. We are already here and seeing this take place in today's world, right now, in real time. We are driving the future of our world to insanity by expecting students and even teachers to be robots, inhuman human robotic machines without personal lives or human feelings and normal bad days. This amount of anxiety usually leads to feelings of isolation and unworthiness due to the perpetuity of recurring thoughts of comparison to other students. "Am I doing enough?" "They have a higher GPA than me... I will never compare" are just basic examples of what runs through our heads.. My head.. And for most, the severity of these thoughts of self-deprecation compound and tend to develop a tighter grip on students as the years go by. Our future, consequently, yielded by this system, will be dominated by anxious mentally and emotionally unstable adults, that will struggle with living with themselves, and as a result, struggle with living life.

I remember hearing horror stories of kids from other schools in the second grade where kids as young as I would outright cry because of the immense pressure and anxiety of taking timed tests. Imagine you, as an innocent child, taking a test and having that test ripped away from you forcefully just as you were about to finish with much disregard to your feelings and ability as a student at that. This anxiety stays with a person, and in turn, it becomes that school isn't just school anymore, it becomes a dangerous playing field that expends copious amounts of mental, emotional, even physical energy to the point of exhaustion and burnout. You can see why apathy in academics can become a sort of defense mechanism for certain students unable to deal or handle the pressure imposed on them from a young age.

This begs the question, Is this how it should be? Children born with such a hungry vibrant capacity and love for learning, diminished and fading away by the age of fifteen, and replaced with crippling anxiety and depression and a whole host of comorbid mental issues that come with such an environment and atmosphere of suffocating pressure and psychological depletion of happiness.

I didn't need a grade for walking, talking, and riding a bike, and I could've gone without getting a grade for reading. What I needed was a passion for learning, for being alive. For teachers who possessed that same passion in pursuit of educating me, enriching my mind, realizing that they are molding and shaping the minds of tomorrow and thus impacting the longevity of the human race, not their ratings, evaluations or reflections of the grade averages of their students. Education should be sought after, not forced. After all, What is learning if it's not acquired through the pure love of it? And most of all what are grades if not a way to capitalize on the minds of students and destroy that pure love of learning that is ultimately found within all of us? We need to nurture and aid in developing that love of learning, and luckily, there is a nation that has adopted this philosophy, and now serves as a model education system we can learn to understand and emulate successfully.

As of this moment, Finland, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and other educational organizations, holds the current position for the #1 ranking education system in the world. With experts calling it, "a miracle of education." it goes without question that, it's doing something right, something we aren't doing.. As America? Well it ranks only at #29. So, What it is Finland doing that we aren't? For starters, it has well-paid teachers, less emphasis on homework, and NO STANDARDIZED TESTS. As well as later start times and most notably... They value cooperation not competition. This I believe, is integral in structuring a wholesome and healthy learning domain for the students. It is everything America should strive to implement. The future of humanity will be much obliged and in better condition if such changes were made.

I believe it is our innately defined purpose and assumed duty as humans to learn, grow and expand our knowledge of our world. This is precisely what separates us from other species. In that our involuntary curious nature is at the core of what makes us who we are and what we are. Through this incredible characteristic of being human can we establish ourselves in this vortex of existence, and through this, we can create and develop the extraordinary. But in doing so, we must work together. We must learn not against, but from, and with each other. We must be one in our pursuit of ourselves and our education.