Why I Love Learning But I Don't Really Like School
So you want to get a degree? Seems simple, right? Everybody seems to tell us that it's what we need to increase our chances of getting a job, that it provides us with an opportunity to be successful, and will remove a lot of stress from our lives. Education is the key. Our parents tell us to make them proud. But, at the same time, what society tells us is: 'Sorry kids, you're either going to have to get a job or go to Uni. Oh, but Uni is probably going to cost you more so you'll need to do both. Also we don't have enough jobs for you'. It all seems pretty messed up to me.
I don't think we need to go to school to get an education and, sadly, sometimes, school actually gets in the way of learning.
The drive to question things and learn how they work is part of human instinct; walking silently in straight lines and sitting in chairs bent over a paper using no more than your hand muscles and brain is not. Humans are born with a drive to learn.
We need to completely reformulate our entire educational system; children need to identify and learn to use the abilities that they have been endowed with.
We need to learn how to learn: it is not enough to shovel information into our heads and have us dig around for it, to regurgitate it on the exams. The world we live in is constantly changing for this to actually work.
"Everybody's a genious but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life thinking it's stupid", said Mr. Einstein. And it's true. It's how unfair the educational system actually is! Different people have different abilities. Why are we all being tested the same way? How is intolerance fair for people growing up? You shouldn't be telling kids struggling that they are failures for missing a year of school of their lives. You should support them!
Tolerance is the key and there's almost no room for it in school!
Ana Margarida Correia, nº 2, 10º L