Like many other students, I am overworked, over stressed, and overdoing it. School is a lot to handle for a young teenager like me. I mean how are 16-year-olds supposed to handle school, sports, clubs, extracurriculars, volunteering, standardized tests, AP classes, jobs, driving lessons, time with family and maintain a social life, all while getting 8 hours of sleep and eating 3 meals a day? (Trust me, the list goes on.) And even if students are managing to do all of these things, it’s only touching the surface of what’s needed to get into elite colleges.
Why has school shifted away from its main purpose, which is to educate? The answer is pretty simple: schools have transformed into business empires. Don’t get me wrong, schools still educate their students, but most of the time only to provide the bare minimum. Why do you think schools follow rubrics and use online websites to grade assignments? Because it’s easier. Schools are taking the easy route. Schools pay their teachers low wages, but expect high-level teaching to produce high-performing students. When these high expectations aren’t met, schools are surprised. Well, what do you expect? Students only provide surface-level work because schools are giving surface-level education.
As I went through each year of my academic journey, I came to realize that the school I once knew had turned into something I now didn’t even recognize. A wide-eyed curious kid became an overwhelmed and stressed-out teenager. I started to lose that love for school that I once had as a kid. Like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, it started to feel like school didn’t quite fit into my life anymore. In my eyes, school’s meaning and purpose had vanished. In fact, I started to question school and my education in general. Why should I even try if exceeding expectations is still not enough? How will what I’m learning even help me in the real world?
Creativity, self expression, and pure imagination are extracted from everyday school lives. Instead we learn, review, cram, study, and repeat. The equivalents of coloring books and macaroni pasta projects from our childhood are nonexistent in high school. Instead, high school resembles the mind-numbing routine of a working job. In our AP Language textbook (pg. 263), New York Times writer, David Barboza, explains an approach schools in Shanghai are taking that alarmingly resembles this harsh transition from student to worker. He discusses that although test scores have gone up, schools in China “stifle creativity” and “deprive children of the joys of childhood”. School has become monotonous, time consuming, and boring. Everyday I feel like I’m doing the same thing. I’ve got 7 hours at school and another 7 hours of homework. I feel restricted from living my life, from just being a teenager. We as teenagers are already struggling enough with the transition from childhood into adulthood and we are forced to grow up too quickly. As we lose our innocence, we lose the passions and joys of our childhood. As we grow up, we are forced into a mold that fits a working society, one that fits the definition of the school’s version of a student, but not an ambitious and enthusiastic teenager. School has become less relevant to us as we are forced to learn topics that bore us. School has become less relevant to us as we are forced to be someone we’re not and to make decisions we aren’t ready to make yet.
Let me use Holden from Catcher in the Rye as an example. Throughout this novel, Holden struggles with being a teenager and dealing with issues with his mental health as well as flunking out of school. He is forced to make decisions about his life that he’s just not ready to make yet. He doesn’t want to be “working in some office” or “reading newspapers, and playing bridge all the time”; he wants to live his life. Holden isn’t ready to become an adult because he’s still holding on to the little bit of innocence he has left. For example, Holden fixates on these ducks in Central Park. Holden sees himself in the ducks because he seeks independence but also feels comforted by this sheltered lifestyle he had had as a child. He also fears change and these ducks, which have to migrate every year to a different location, are changing their lifestyles to adapt to their environment, which Holden finds discomforting. This idea that Holden has to make important decisions that will impact his future shouldn’t be the basis of school. School should be a safe environment for students, like Holden, to pursue their own passions and explore their own learning interests. School should be a place where teenagers have the ability to find their own purpose.
Even if you put Holden’s situation aside, there are still so many students in the world who resonate with his same feelings. Holden struggles to get by on a daily basis which eventually leads to him flunking out of school due to lack of focus and support. For many students, these same issues are occurring. Students tend to lose focus on school because of issues going on at home. Teachers, educators, and even other students seem to forget the daily difficulties some teenagers have to go through, on top of dealing with the stress of schoolwork. It’s almost dehumanizing; we envision this clear-cut frame that students have to fit into, but don’t think of everything they might be going through or the hidden circumstances that affect their learning.
Let’s use Anthony Abraham Jack as an example. As a low-income student, Anthony worked four jobs while in college, all because he had to support both himself and his family back home. If he didn’t send money, his family’s electricity would be shut off. If he didn’t send money, his relative couldn’t take their diabetes medicine. In Anthony’s case, he needed to work and be in school just to survive. Even the school faculty just couldn’t understand why he was overloading himself. A lack of resources for low-income students like Anthony Abraham Jack once again show how schools are losing their purpose. Schools need to be more understanding with students’ capabilities and be aware of all the factors that may be affecting their schoolwork. Schools need to better accommodate to their students, so students can truly flourish in their learning environment.
Now to contrast Holden and Anthony’s situations, I bring to light the teenagers who are finding their own purpose in schools. For example, Chassidy Titley, a teenager from Harlem, New York, who created a group at her school to call out the school’s wrongful actions and to protest on issues that she’s passionate about. She is taking action against her own school to change and improve its policies. She is working to make her education more relevant to her and to students around her. Your voice is your strongestweapon and using it to invoke change is exactly how students, like Chassidy, are able to change school policies to make their learning applicable to their interests. Having student representation and allowing students to voice their opinions on matters that affect them are great ways for schools to better appeal to students and accommodate their needs.
Schools should make themselves fit for their students, instead of forcing students to fit for them. Let students question and explore. Let students fuel their passions. Let students find their own purpose.
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