I was so passionate about the concept of learning new things in my first few years of elementary school. The colors were vibrant, the pace was steady and enjoyable, and common topics were almost always accompanied by a song, but somewhere down the line things began to change. At around the end of fourth grade and the entirety of fifth grade, the focus of learning and education shifts from interaction and enjoyment to a rigid structure and statistical improvement.
From that point in my academic career on, the school became something I absolutely dreaded. It felt as though every other month we were plagued with some variation of a standardized test that seemed perfectly formulated to make each student feel their own special kind of inadequate, and though they claimed you couldn’t “fail” these tests, it was very clear among the students who were superior and sub par in the eyes of the education board.
In high school, this only grew worse and by my sophomore year, I’d all but grown numb to education as a whole. It became clear to me that my teachers did not care about whether or not I was learning the content so long as I scored a high enough score on my final exam or my mid-semester reports. To the system, I was no longer a student. I was not a young mind ripe and full an overwhelming thirst for knowledge, I was a number, a statistic used to chart the “excellence” of the district. In a way, I think that they just believed we didn’t notice what they were doing, or that we were so desensitized by the system that we couldn’t be bothered to grow irritated, but I was.
Because as a young elementary school-goer I had more excitement about history and reading and art than I couldn’t ever think to express, and I noticed very quickly that the light I once had for learning had faded. For so long, though, I was made to believe that I didn’t care anymore because I was lazy, but that wasn’t the case. I knew that it did not matter if I was learning as long as my marks were up to the district's standards, so what was the point of trying? My teachers did not care, so, why should I?
Teachers are appalled by the overwhelming number of cases involving cheating and plagiarism, and they often attribute this to the students’ laziness but they don’t consider the flip side of this: perhaps your students are cheating because the emphasis is no longer on learning and only on how high the scores are. Perhaps if you tried to engage with your students and put the focus back on what education SHOULD be intended for, your students wouldn’t feel the need to cheat. Today, you won’t find just those “lazy” kids trying to snag the answers off of the person beside them because they didn’t study, you’ll also find the students with perfect marks doing the same in an effort to preserve their spot. It’s not just about laziness, it’s about the way these grades and these exams are made to make us feel less-than if we aren’t out performing or peers.
Schools took the fun out of learning as if it wasn’t necessary, and I noticed. I noticed that I didn’t really matter anymore and that the expansion of my mind and the minds of my peers was not the priority anymore, and I grew resentful and rather tired of the system using me as a pawn in their agenda. As a kid, I was so excited to learn about history and science and even math and today the idea of those make me roll my eyes so far to the back of my head that I can actually see my brain.
When people asked me in high school what my favorite subject was, I would grow physically anxious because I had no real interest in anything anymore. I would find myself answering with something that I used to enjoy because I couldn’t really answer that question truthfully in regards to my current favorite. Something is wrong with that. Something is wrong with students not caring about learning anymore because you have a society full of proficient standardized test-takers who couldn’t tell you who fought in what war or what happened in “Catcher in the Rye” even though we were all forced to read it.
The education systems reform is not and should not be on the increase of standardize test scores or the increase in quarterly grades, but instead, an emphasis should be put on the expansion on young people’s minds. The emphasis should be on getting young people interested in art and science and history again by making it interactive and shying away from shunning students for not excelling in certain fields. These are the next generation who will one day be running society, and if we are producing robots, I worry for this nation.
