Education is the most vital neccesity to maintaining our hapiness and freedom. Yet what is Education? Is it pumping facts into our heads, it is learning how to speak English properly, is it the grades we get on our tests? NO!

You may have heard of THEE "Great" Educational Reforms they are trying to enact. Well I say these reforms are a waste. Because as Thoreau once said "Moral reform is the effort to throw of sleep." How then can they consciously claim to be making reform when all they are doing is CHANGING THE DREAM!. What would really change if they stopped grading so much? Why is grading to be a headline issue? The first thing that MUST change is THEE learning environment. We sit in a square wooden desk, like every other square wooden desk, We sit in rows like every other row, and we sit in square rooms like every... other... square... room. The little individuality we are allowed is drained my this simple uniformity.

School destroys creative learning, in every stage, as teachers implant their ideology into the minds of their students. Art teachers force their student to draw ROCKETSHIPS, when all they feel is Yellow, Teachers force their students to BE QUIET, when all they feel is scream. Teachers force their students to SIT when all they feel is run. As Thoreau said "If a man does not keep with his COMPANIONS, perhaps it is because he hears a different DRUMMER."

Why are choices for classes so narrow? Why are people required to take English and History when they care little to none, about the subjects. By the High School grade level, students are old enough to know what they are interested in, and what they would like to expand their minds upon. Very few classes that we take are applicable in real life, and very few are enjoyable to the students taking them.

You would think that we would have learned from such European countries as Germany by now, who, at the age of 16 allow their students to enter a trade school so that they can learn their skills before they are forced to go out and face the harsh reality of the real world. Countries like Germany, also pay for the education ALL THE WAY through college.

Instead, what does our country produce? A batallion of life long McDonalds, and Burger King workers. Or is that what they want us to become. To feul the corporate machine, into which we dump so much of our money, and which will exploit us as much as possible. Obviously, their aims for education are questionable.

"QUESTION EVERYTHING!" a statement I often hear come from the mouths of teachers, but all too often I also hear "Take My word for it" or "You wouldn't understand." It is THEIR job to make us understand, and perhaps it is they who do not understand, WE ARE HERE TO LEARN! Why should I take anyones word for anything? As Emerson said "NOTHING is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."