Isn't Autumn beautiful? The dying leaves a mosaic of ruddy colors challenging even the most gorgeous of sunsets, the crisp cool air revealing our misty white breath, and the joyful cries of children as they return to school eager to fill their minds with knowledge. Or is that the pouting, miserable complaints of kids so sick of school that if they have to memorize another formula or recite another useless fact they're going to puke?
I'm in grade 12, I'm a senior, and this year I get to graduate. It's about time. I am more than fed up with Ontario's pathetic "education" system, and I mean at every level: the curriculum, the teachers, the education board itself, and especially the attitude that is preached in school. Actually, to call this an education system is decieving. It's a schooling system, there's no education involved here.
Schooling is not the same as education. School is where you go to memorize facts about life, education is knowing how to use those facts to live your life. We are not taught the things we really should be taught in school. Things like how to think for yourself, how to learn on your own, how to make change in the world, how to live in the world. The job of teaching the basics of life is left to teachers, and they're doing a shitty job. We should be taught to think and live and learn, and most importantly, how to think for ourselves, how to be individuals. Having information shoved down our throats, and regurgitating it on paper whether we understand it or not is counterproductive. This information doesn't help you become a person. Granted, knowledge is useful, but it depends on what you do with that knowledge and how you apply it. And unfortunately, so few students know how to apply that knowledge because they're taught just to memorize information so they can pass the test, instead of how to use that information and apply it.
School is made up to be the absolute most important part of a teenager's life, a ridiculous and harmful concept. There is so much pressure on kids to succeed, every test is of absolute importance and every assignment must be perfect because if you slack off you'll never be anything. But the teachers and parents who enforce this attitude are forgetting something; life is far more important than school. I'd have to say that the things I've learned outside of school are more useful than anything I'll ever learn in school. Education is not about getting a job, it's about educating yourself. What the school system is doing is teaching kids how to conform to society, to gear kids towards going to university and getting a "real" job, instead of encouraging kids to develop more important skills for communication and learning. Just look at how the arts and literary arts are being cut. The whole world does not revolve around only technology and scholastic studies. It revolves around people, and people are not arithmetic and grammar. Forcing kids to adopt ways of thinking that are conductive only to academic and scholarly careers represses their ability to communicate and express themselves.
I guess my biggest gripe is that I've been in the school system for 13 years, and I can't help but feeling that they were all for nothing. I've known for years now what I'm interested in doing when I'm out of highschool. But no courses were ever geared towards those careers. Naturopathy, vocal performance, earth sciences, psychology, and entrepreneurship aren't exactly the kinds of courses that are offered in highschool.
After I graduate, my schooling life will be put on hold for awhile so that I can make up for 13 years of lost education. It's sad that I'm so disappointed with my schooling career, but that's not going to change until teachers and the system shape up.
My apologies for the scattered, unfocussed writing full of grammar mistakes in this entry. What can you expect? We're not taught grammar, spelling, sentence structure, or any of the other important components of language in school. Gotta go, math homework awaits. I remain,
apocrypha
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