It's the most wonderful time of the year. Sleep is just a fairytale, you have caffeine IV'd into your bloodstream, and the only thing keeping you from going absolutely insane are those little naps you guiltlessly take on the sofa in the library.
It's finals week, a.k.a. hell week. Finals week, in short, is the perfect euphemism for what the American education system has truly become—a monotonous grind of repetition and memorization, devoid of actual learning. I think the number one thing students leaving high school think is "when am I ever going to use this?" And for the most part, they are right. It has become abundantly clear that our education system has devolved to center around memorization, and not application.
This really never changed up until I got into college, and even now it varies by professor. The kind of professor you want in college is not the one who makes the class a blowoff, but a professor who actively engages students in learning the material and applying it to real life.
Whether you are a history major or a math major, memorization is important. You need to be able to recall the fundamental ideas behind what you are learning. My issue is that education scarcely goes beyond that. Many teachers have stopped challenging students, especially in the public school system, because the State requires a certain amount of passing students. But has the federal government considered the idea that students are more than a way to fill a quota? Sure, but the supreme court is yet to actually recognize education as a fundamental right.This all brings me to my main issue, which is that most classes have become a memory test.
There are exceptions to this of course, but for the most part, the majority of my teachers have not made me truly apply what I am learning in the classroom to everyday life. Economics is an obvious exception to this because the science of scarcity applies to everything, not just business. Regardless, as I sit here and grind through various equations and facts about astronomy, I have realized that I am not really learning anything. I am just memorizing things. And after I finish my final and borderline sprint out of that classroom, I am going to leave most of what I "learned" behind—because education today has become more about just getting by, and not about the deeper roots of learning. Sure, I will remember some facts that stood out for me, but there is a huge difference between regurgitating useless information and applying it to your life. A good example of this is the scene in Goodwill Hunting, where the pompous Harvard student gets called out by Will for effectively verbally plagiarizing other's work.
(Language warning)
Whether or not the directors intended for this scene to be a fantastic representation of the problems with American education, it still works. There is a stark difference between intelligence, and having a good memory. Schools seem to focus on the latter because it is easier to make kids cram facts into their head rather than actually make them think about how what they are learning applies to their career. So to bring all of this together, my issue with studying for finals is not in the work—it is what we are working towards. Namely that is a good grade, and not actually learning. Students today are driven by a single number: their GPA. This number, quite frankly, represents how hard someone is able to work, not how smart they are. If that doesn't represent the issues with our education system in their entirety, I don't know what else does. Will my college degree mean anything other than the fact that I was good at memorizing stuff? Hopefully. The substance behind what makes education so incredibly important is that it is the motor that drives progress forward. I just hope that the system that provides it will realize that before it is too late.
