Lost in a mass of AP classes, athletics and extracurricular activities, students often find themselves in a jumbled hurricane of the education system leaning to the holidays to be the eye. When did the education system become like this? I remember those days when it was just about the love for learning and creativity rather than stats and GPA. When did it become just about the stats? People I attended high school with were constantly obsessed with their rank and GPA. The education system is now entirely individuals just attending to get the grades and enroll in a "decent" college.
Students are now suffering more than ever to keep up their academics due to the immense amounts of stress that schools put on an individual. Much of these expectations of the system is absolutely impossible!
Look at it this way--an example: student attends school for about seven hours and takes, let's say, two AP classes and two honors classes. Each of those two AP classes take two hours of extra time outside of class everyday to complete homework and study. The honors classes take an hour each because they are not as strenuous. Since the student is taking two AP classes that's four hours of extra work everyday plus an additional two hours for the honors classes. That's already six hours of work the student will have to complete for the classes to maintain an A in all of them. The student already had seven hours of school and now that extends to six more hours of school work! How can an education system possibly expect a student to maintain that level of effort? To make matters worse, students have to participate in extracurricular activities such as clubs and sports to obtain entrance into a "decent" college.Those clubs and sports also take a few decent hours and are often strenuous. How does one expect a student to balance out all of these tasks and still manage to function?
Because of this unnecessary burden, a majority of the students either fall under the pressure or fight to maintain their grades by staying up all night and turning to stimulants.
This statement leads to another issue with the high school education system : The start time. Yes, school starts at 7:15 a.m. at most schools (especially in North Carolina). However, starting that early is not a good idea because studies have shown that the brain is not fully active until 10 a.m., therefore, hindering the cognitive abilities and learning.
Also, for those who still rely on public transportation have to rise an hour or so earlier at around 5:30 a.m. to 6 a.m. to catch the bus. If the workload is several hours long and the wake up time is as early as 5:30 then how does a student function properly with the high school education system? Yes, this time is due mainly to the bus schedules and athletics, but if you take 30 minutes out of each high school class, you get two hours to start school late. Starting school at 9:15 a.m. instead of 7:15 a.m. while still result in the bus schedule and extracurricular activities to remain on schedule and the extra thirty minutes of class cut will be no big deal because teachers mostly end up wasting that first 30 minutes anyways with hour long warm-ups and such.
A later wake-up time encourages productivity and learning. However, learning isn't the main focus anymore in high school. Rather than learning students often just memorize contents being "taught" to obtain a good grade and add on to their GPA. That's not what school is meant to be about. School and education is about learning and experiencing the topic rather than independent reading a textbook and memorizing for a test.
What's worse is that even teachers seem indifferent to actual learning as long as the student passes the standardized testing and turns in their work. This method of learning and teaching is highly unproductive and discourages actual intellectual growth.
That brings me to my next issue: standardized testing. It is great to test knowledge to see how much you have actually learned. However, standardized testing is not the way to go. Why? Because standardized testing is far too complex, yet very general to fit the learning style of every person.
Albert Einstein once said, "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." This is true with the education system today, there are so many diverse intellect and people in the system, how can one test possibly determine how intelligent someone is or how prepared they are for college. I understand that the tests provide a simple means for stats, but at what cost? By depriving those less suitable of equal opportunity?
I remember one class I had in high school, which contained of absolutely no tests (it was an AP literature class). Nearly everyone did phenomenal in that class because instead of tests, we were measured on our true intellect to decipher and write to our own style. That's what testing should be. Instead of meaningless standardized testing with complex words that stray vastly from the content, why not study the different types of student and test them in the best way they thrive?
It's true, the education system in america needs a lot of polishing. However, it's never too late to start. We can ensure the betterment of education with a few simple changes and more effort as a whole to really creating that learning environment once more. We should alleviate the focus on GPA and focus more on learning and experience to grow as a person. GPA doesn't matter in the long run when you have achieved your desired job. It can help obtain that career, but it won't matter when you enter the working field. We should find new ways to test intellect and capability rather than just test scores and GPA.
