What is lost in public, K-12 schools is an appreciation of education. A similar sentiment can be said (to a lower degree) for junior colleges and community colleges. As I enter my junior year at Cal, I have become fully immersed in the “world” that many had raved to me about prior to my first days on-campus. It is a world of students that are driven individually as well as thrown into the furnace that is the competitive field of the University of California, Berkeley. Every midterm matters, every internship position is sought after and limited. The people of this academic world use a mixture of talent, stress-management, and skills learned from a lifetime of academia to position themselves to excel. Why? Because they understand the necessity of education and the opportunity for higher-education offered at a place like Cal. This mentality is an exception.
From pre-K to 12th-grade, I attended (I would say) above-average public schools in the suburbs of the North Bay Area. I was often amongst the top-students in a given class (though, admittedly, never the top student) and benefited from a parenting style that put a premium on school. I enjoyed the process of academics naturally. So when I began to encounter peers that didn’t share the natural ability or passion for school it was disconcerting to my young brain but my neurotic, competitive thought process quickly realized that these students had essentially removed themselves from the competition pool. I didn’t have to worry about them in my single-minded pursuit of straight A’s and being #1 in the class because they took themselves out for me. Now that I am older and out of the K-12 system, I have gained more perspective and realize that this lack of engagement is a prominent problem on a societal level. A generation of entitled yet ignorant adults is only good for doing as they're told, being dependent, and not thinking for themselves.
‘When will I need this?’
School attendance on a K-12 level is compulsory, regardless of how good or bad one may do. So while these students ask a teacher teaching, say, point-slope form in Algebra I, “when will I need this in my life?”, their naive ignorance and laughable cynicism blind them from the entire point of the overall learning process. They are ignorant (this may be a trigger word for feeling indignant, but it literally means “lack of knowledge”) because they don't know what they don’t know, a trait we can see in many adults, actually (sips tea). Their cynicism is laughable because everyone, myself included, believes they have the world figured out when they’re 17. The age-old question of necessity attempts to minimize the value of only a portion of a curriculum to illuminate the failure of the curriculum as a whole, despite the reality that the implied argument is a fallacy. No, you likely won’t need point-slope in everyday life. But you need to master it for a test that impacts a grade, a grade that will either allow you to proceed with your free education or bury you to remediality. That should be enough reason to seek excellence. Basic math skills like fractions aren't going to be necessary for you to correctly make an unprotected left-turn, but they will be when you're looking to save money at the grocery store. Most everything you learn in K-12 are building blocks of information that are mental tools for life. Ignoring the importance of these tools will only hurt you.
The Inconvenient Truth
(All rhetorical questions will mainly be directed to the naive, cynical young student)
Intelligence is a trait that is prized in nearly every possible profession. The job-market in the United States is cut-throat and being a faster, more efficient employee is valuable. Being smarter allows you to approach obstacles without stress and anxiety, instead with options and solutions.
In the post-No Child Left Behind world, the high school diploma is no longer the standard, it is the minimum requirement. Why do you think adults who lack a h.s. diploma take it upon themselves to get a GED?
Here’s why: because when everyone has a diploma, the value of the piece of paper is reduced. It is simple inflation (a concept you should know from economics or US History 2). Like currency, the more there is in circulation, the less valuable it is. I am not attempting to tarnish the glory of graduation in any sense. I myself enjoyed my final high school semester very much, including finally walking. But this is reality. The standard diploma doesn’t mean as much and the data shows. According the US Census Bureau, by 2015, 56.4 percent of people had achieved at least a high school diploma and 32.0 percent a Bachelor’s degree or higher. This trend in higher-education appears to have started at least since 1940. If that doesn’t answer your question of “when will I need this,” it should.
I’m sure teachers of young people find it absolutely frustrating when a student is unable to grasp the gravity of their opportunity. Educators themselves went through university and attained bachelor’s if not master’s degrees, joining a profession that is underpaid and under-appreciated just to have a kid who simply cannot shake the laziness of youth to engage in thinking. For goodness sake, they bemoan their oh-so terrible youths when education is handed to them.
For all the people that excelled without education in business, music, athletics, there are thousands that failed without education and live a life of struggle. The reality in this country is that there are winners and losers. Plain and simple. And if you don’t have the basic human capital of education, you are already at a disadvantage to the hundred upon thousands of valedictorians and salutatorians that come out of high school ready for the next-level of competition, whether it be in an industry or academia.
Human Evolution through Intellectual Pursuit
The value of education is that it builds upon literally thousands of years of human thought and experience all consolidated for your “ease” of learning. It is the ultimate process of learning from others’ experience. From Socrates and Descartes to the latest big studies conducted in the STEM fields, the process of expanding our (human) horizons occur on a constant basis. The discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle and artifacts from ancient cultures the world over allow humans of today to actually be in the 21st century. It allows us to be on the cutting-edge of technology. Taking that for granted is easy, because we simply pay for the newest iPhone without understanding to meticulous man-hours put in that got us to the point that we, as a species, can instantly connect to people thousands of miles away. Why do you think higher-education is so valued? In part, because it is so difficult to master, for example, microbiology or electrical engineering & computer science. Those topics generalize literally thousands of individual people's effort and life's work into semester/quarter long classes. So, of course it is difficult. What is attained, however, is priceless. Perspective, rational/ logical thought, and understanding that the more you know, the more you don't know. These intangible things allow us to think without the cloudiness of bias and emotion.
Exposing yourself to new ideas ought to expand your perspective, allowing one to avoid the trap of narrow-minded cynicism. The ability to think for yourself, to understand that people elsewhere live with an entirely different set of circumstances than you, to avoid being a part of the masses as a cog in the consumerist society we have become. Education allows one to develop the brain, which can either be used on a primitive level to simply acquire pleasure and maintain survival or do those things alongside pushing the limits of God-given (or the product of thousands of years of evolution) processing power to grasp metaphysical philosophy and supermassive black holes.
Not The Promise Land
Higher education is not the yellow brick road, don’t get me wrong. I know many people quite close to me that have lived life successfully with only a high school diploma. Peers have followed alternatives to education such as the military or applying themselves passionately to the blue-collar workforce. But even in these alternatives, there is a requisite level of intellectual attainment that allows for one to be effective in their career path. College isn’t for everyone, but to be naive enough to believe that you are better than learning basic math, science, English, and history on the high school level is absolutely foolhardy. Denying yourself education is denying yourself the knowledge to effectively and accurately approach the spectrum of events that occur in adult life. This includes being fully informed in politics, news, profession-based bureaucracy, technological and medicinal innovations, and more, while also being able to form a valid, logical opinion. Knowing what you know and don’t know bleeds into every facet of your life. Keeping yourself in the dark and living the ignorance-is-bliss lifestyle is not going to garner any sympathy when you cannot overcome obstacles, at least not from me.
Only a small minority effectively employ alternatives to education. Hell, some live a life of poverty with a degree of higher-education in their hands! There are no sure-things, except that being ignorant isn’t going to give you the best chances.
Dispelling the Myth
It is not lost on me that is a gross disparity among public schools. Some newer schools are seemingly pumped with funding while others struggle to even order new desks let alone textbooks. Nor is it lost on me that there are truly incompatible teaching-styles as well as conflicting personalities that strain the student-teacher relationship. Those are troubles of milieu and I wish I could fix them, but the fact of the matter is, sometimes you’re going to have to find a way to deal with people in life that you don’t want to deal with (perhaps your boss?), so you may as well start with the person with a final word on your report card.
The last section of this inconvenient answer is that you, students, need to “check your privilege.” I often see hilariously illogical tweets or Facebook posts lambasting the flaws of high school, stating that the focus on geometry and US history, for example, fails to leave students with an effective skillset to approach tax forms, obtain a bank loan, budget, and more “adult life” things. Instead, students are left with 'useless' factoids about 1783, the Articles of Confederation, Pythagorus's Theorem, and The Catcher In the Rye because of the demonic standardized testing centric curriculum. Standardized testing is a topic that would require another write-up on its own, and I agree that teaching-to-the-test is only hurting students' education. However, what I say to those that believe that the overall school system is not serving our students by providing them education on topics from biology to trigonometry to higher-English, is that school is not where people get taught to be adults. This argument ties in with the ongoing problem seen even on university campuses pertaining to student resilience. The thought-paradigm for today’s students is a flawed concept that school is supposed to do the job that, in reality, parents are supposed to do. School is not a glorified daycare. You go there to learn about baseline, foundational topics that prepare you to take on the real-deal vigor of university academics. That’s it. In fact, I dare to posit that you are expected to carry yourself like an adult at school! That isn’t to say that the adults that are your teachers cannot help inform you on “adult life” and I’m sure if you built a rapport with them they’d be happy to help you. But do not expect to be spoon-fed information on how to go about the rest of your life and reach the pinnacle of success by sitting in that desk. Expect a lecture on information that will be pertinent to the final.
"Now what?"
Graduating often coincides with newfound independence. Being an adult has its perks, but the truth of the matter is that an increasing responsibility to yourself is the most prominent change. You are in charge of you. There’ll be no hallway monitor or parent to lead you on the right path. And before you think the school-system is doing you a disservice by failing to teach you how to get a loan to buy your first car or how one approaches a mortgage, consider this: do you think the IRS wants you to know how to correctly do your taxes such that you get as much on your tax return as you can? Do you think the bank wants to give you a loan that it can’t milk you for via interest for the longest amount of time it can? What company or store wants you to be an effective budgeteer/ extreme-couponer so that you don’t fill their cash-registers with your hard-earned wages?
We live in a capitalist society. We also live in a society where you can do what you want with your money, even if it means your detriment. That is what adult independence is. If you want life-skills that will help you avoid these hiccups, get smart. Seek out the answers yourself. Relying on others is a sure-fire way to be disappointed with the results. Only your name is on that diploma and attaining it is a feat worth celebrating, but keeping in mind that it is only the first step into the next chapter of your life and not the end of school- or work-related stress entirely will spare you the cynicism that so many in university now experience. Will you need to know sin, cosine, and tangent ever again? If you decide to become an English major, likely no. If you decide to be a math, physics, computer science, pre-med, [insert other STEM fields] major, likely yes. It is knowing these foundational ideas, however, that will allow you to make that decision for yourself.