Students wake up, get ready for another long, stressful- and what seems useless at this point- day. The saying “there are not enough hours in a day.” Please, have you attended high school? Every student in high school becomes stress due to the excessive amount of unneeded work we are doing, just to hear “Stressed? You do not even know what that is.” As we are drowning in the pool of our tests, schoolwork, extracurricular activities we are expected to have, we have to be making sure that we are maintaining good grades in all of our classes. The American Education system is not giving students a full and fair opportunity to succeed.
All of our high school career we are being prepared for college. High school consists of preparing us to take tests that will make or break us for getting into a good college. Every class that is being given to us, the whole year, we are just being preparing for the section of that subject on a test. Since 5th grade we have been preparing for middle school, and in middle school we prepared for high school, and now in high school we continue to prepare for college. Which college, when you really think about it, is just preparing us for our jobs.
With the American education system we are just being taught how to take tests well, not how to truly learn the subject. Our test scores drop, and our stress levels rise. The better test scores, we as students score, the better our schools and teachers look. I do not feel as though I am being taught useful, and helpful tools for life, but that I am just being taught how to take tests. Claremont college did a study that says “teachers are relying on poorly made testing programs.” Instead of relying on standardized tests to show how much a student has grown, the education system should see how a student’s grade has been throughout the year. As a student who has barely passed any standardized test that I have ever taken, but is receiving good grades throughout the year, my standardized tests show absolutely nothing. According to “Why Finland's schools are top-notch” by Pasi Sahlberg, in Finland, the students only take one standardized test, which is given at the end of the student's final year. Getting rid of most standardized tests will probably lower students stress levels. Finland’s schools are ranked number third, and America is twenty-one. If we followed in Finland’s footsteps, then maybe our world ranking would increase.
The curriculum that teachers are required to teach seems to be as though it was set up for us to fail. According to Hailey Gross in “Classics should be taught to an appropriate age” she says “High school students are too young to really appreciate classics.” Keeping classic literature in the curriculum is setting students up for failure. Pieces like Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet are too hard for a high school student to understand. Books that are irrelevant to the time of the students that are reading it, serve absolutely no purpose to them. Classic literature that is being taught is like exercise, a little of it is okay, but if you do too much of it, it will just end up hurting you in the end. Although some people believe that keeping classic literature in the curriculum is a necessity to a child’s learning, they have not helped students in any way. They have not made any of the test scores rise, or increased their overall intelligence. Although it may seem the teachers are driving education straight into the ground, it is the curriculum, and system of education. The American Education system, as results have showed, has not been working. American Education is not giving us a fair opportunity to learn.
