The truth behind the educational system: Let’s stop the rat race!

By Rallia Mamali
B2 student
House of English

Around 70% of the human population believe that school will improve the lives of the students in the future. But they cannot see the truth that is hidden behind schooling. Only students can see it, and when they see it, they can’t unsee it. Truth hurts and the truth is that schools actually don’t help anyone’s life.
First of all, teachers can’t teach their lessons in a way that students can understand the lesson. That is because they are not very much allowed to have a unique teaching style. Instead, they all have to follow the same pattern, the same way they of teaching, which is usually controlled by the government based on the standardized exams that all students have to sit for at the end of the year. In this way, many teachers make the lesson incomprehensible and sometimes they may even feel insecure about their own lesson. The fact that the government doesn’t let the teachers do their job as they please or as they have dreamt of is just mind-blowing.
Although teachers may know how difficult school is for a child, they require from us to do all our homework and study very hard every day, and if we don’t follow the educator’s directions we will be reprimanded. As students, we have to do our homework, but there are days when will feel exhausted. And school basically tells us that we must do our homework no matter what. What will happen if we get sick or we waste our energy because of too much homework?
Moreover, almost all educators are in a hurry to finish the course material as soon as possible, without caring about our free time. In this way, we start keeping secrets, we feel more pressured and anxious. There are some moments at school that we will all go through, such as forgetting about our homework or forgetting to study for a test. And how will the teachers deal with this? They will yell to us and they will make us regret, in a negative way, for something that we had forgotten. As a result, we will end up being pessimistic, depressed, with lower expectations and without any dreams for the future.
Furthermore, another factor that we, students, feel anxiety for, is the way we are assessed at school and the fact that we feel that our careers depend on that. Just because we might not be as “active” as other students at school, we may get lower marks, which in reality does not mean that we won’t be successful in life or that we won’t get a good job or have a lucrative career in the future.
When someone gets “bad” grades at school, society considers them as unsuccessful. It’s pathetic... Can we take a second and think about how students’ lives would be without tests and grades? What would happen next? How would next generations feel about education and success? Will society consider people as “failures" because of the mistakes they would make? We need to normalize making mistakes. We’re humans and we will make mistakes or we will never succeed in life. Maybe we should think that mistakes and not excellence has motivated humanity in making a step further. As Sir Kevin Robinson said “If we’re not prepared to be wrong, we will never come up with anything original”.
In addition, at school we are not educated about basic stuff that will help us in the future such as personal finance, mindset and thinking, business and productivity, self-care and life skills and a lot more.

I came across a video on Tik Tok by a teenage girl called Lala, living in Canada who said: “I wonder why do we need to know how to pay for taxes or how to get an insurance card? Why do we need to know all that stuff if we know that the power house of the cell is mitochondria? Why do we need to memorize our social security number, if we already have about thousands and thousands of
math equation shoved down our heads? I get it...school and education is a path towards our careers and future, but why is it so hard for our parents and our teachers to understand that the only thing that will help us be more “mature” isn’t just shoving down information. Reality is a pull an all-nighter every day, studying for a test to get that “perfect” 20 to make our parents proud. But in the end, after we take that test and get that 20 all that information goes right out of our heads. And from all of this, we didn’t gain anything more but a waste of time”. Our thoughts are absolutely parallel with this girl. She’s surely right. What a harsh school life...

Over and above that, teachers put every day so much homework and as a result we feel tired every day. Imagine having twenty subjects at school and having a different teacher to each subject. That means that twenty teachers are putting over four exercises per three days. That’s too much work. The thing is that, when we forget to do the exercises for a lesson, we are being judged in a negative way. But teachers do not know that we were busy with other important things or that we were studying for another lesson. We can’t just simply do everything at the same day.
Every single person has to respect us. We are all trying so hard not to disappoint you and the entire world. Despite this awful educational system, we are still studying and trying to do the best we can at school. We learn about two or more different languages. Eight kids out of ten are doing a sport, and many of them have won important medals. We don’t have free time to rest. In the morning we are at school, at noon we study, in the afternoon we do sports or other extracurricular activities and, in the evening, time passes very quickly. We usually don’t have time to talk with our friends during the day, except at school.
In another video Lala, the teenage girl from Canada, said that: “Isn’t it weird that at some point when we were kids, we always wanted to be grown-ups? We wished we could be adults or teenagers. When we turned 1, our lives had just begun. When we turned two we learned how to chew. When we turned 5, we were so excited because our dad would teach us how to dive. When we turned 13, we were happy because we were finally teenagers. And, when we will turn 16, probably most of us will be sad and angry because everyone will want to make us so lean. They will expect us to be perfect, exquisite, amazing, excellent, flawless, immaculate. What kind of messed up generation is this? What kind of messed up society is this? What are we teaching our generations that are going to come after us? That we have to be PERFECT in order to succeed? No, we don’t. We need to be ourselves in order to succeed”. She’s
speaking facts. Almost all students are facing depression because the world is expecting us to be second to none.
Finally, I am obviously part of the 30% of the human population that does NOT believe that school will improve our lives. The problems of education are increasing every single day and I am afraid that sooner or later the educational system will fall apart and we will not be able to do anything. I can imagine how education would be when it falls. All the students will be depressed and stressed and they will only care about grades. The teachers, on the other side, would be the “bad” ones. Putting difficult tests every single day, without warning the kids about it and without explaining the lesson at all, just teaching it by the book. In one word, chaos.
In conclusion, I believe that our educational system is broken and it needs our help. No one can change it but us. Every day many students are having headaches and stomachaches because of too much stress. Most of the kids are now depressed and the saddest part is that some students have even committed suicide. All of that because they were feeling pressured. We have all experienced the way that education now works and we can change it. Make a better and safer educational system. Where every teacher is free to plan their own lesson and be independent. Where every student feels free and is extrovert. Where there is no “perfect”, there is meaningful homework and exams that make sense. Where everyone is pleased because they go to school to gain valuable knowledge and not to memorize facts. All of us are responsible to change our educational system before the next generations live a worse version of the life we are living now.

 

 

Inspired by my English teachers, my parents, my friends, my aunt and my cousins.