As an incoming freshman at Columbia, I would tend to be regarded as someone who has thrived in the educational system in place today. Yet, although many swear by the meritocracy of schools, I have watched too many friends and colleagues being unjustly labelled according to their ability to excel in exams or their choice of subject.

I have never found an appropriate medium to voice my concerns publicly, yet here is to hoping this may change.

1. The Mechanical Nature of Exams

Students have been conditioned to memorize specific facts and figures and later be examined in a cyclic, mechanical manner. Critical thinking is not as highly valued in schools as is the ability to perform well under timed conditions in unnatural settings. Students who can retain most information covered in class and work under pressure are often the most successful. In effect, this mechanical process leads to a lot of discrimination within schools. Until the end of middle school, I was easily distracted in class and had a poor exam performance. I was labelled as stupid and slow, while being laughed at by the other children, simply because my strengths were not demonstrated by a score on my paper. I have seen the same trend throughout high school with some of my friends, people who are excellent sportsmen and women, artists, avid readers and social workers. Our educational system has refused to see them as notable simply because their strengths do not lie in exam taking. Shouldn’t it be fostering these different form of intelligence, rather than marginalizing them?

2. Extensive Curriculums

During my Biology classes in high school, my class took interest in the ethical issues regarding embryonic cells. We often went on a tangent to explore this area, and although my teacher was keen to explain, our extensive curriculums meant we had little time to debate material unrelated to the curriculum. Although academic subjects often aim to be multidisciplinary, they fail to achieve this by forcing teachers to abide to tight schedules.

3. Quarantine From Nature

This point is often overlooked by critics of our academic institutions, but it is important to remind ourselves what most schools look like today. The typical classroom consists of four walls, artificial lighting, a few windows and a door. Children are forced to sit for hours on end, squinting their eyes to take note of whatever is being taught. Those who refuse are often declared to have ADHD, or some other disorder, and are duly medicated. From a young age, we are quarantined from the outdoors, having only few, rare moments of the day or week reserved for recess. Biophobia, a term coined by author and environmental advocate David Orr, is real. The school children of today have been conditioned to stay away from nature, to label anything natural as dirty. In a world where environmental issues could come to menace our future, we are raising children to shun, rather than love, their earth. Why aren’t more classes held outside? Why aren’t children taught to garden, to differentiate seeds and cultivate the soil? Traits that were so important to our ancestors have been chucked in the trash, forgotten, and instead have been replaced by artificial lighting and sitting for hours glued on plastic chairs.