What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of standardized testing? Boring? Long? Stressful? The SAT, ACT, IB, SOLs, AP tests, ASVAB. All of those acronyms just make my head want to swim and I’m sure I’m not alone. As standardized testing becomes more rigid, more teachers are “teaching to the test,” a practice that has been proven detrimental to young minds.

A recent study has shown that divergent thinking, the ability to think outside the box, in students drops as they are “educated.” Ninety-eight percent of kindergarten students test at the genius level for divergent thinking. Five years later, the same children were tested and the number dropped to fifty percent. Five years later, the number dropped even further. This is what needs to change in the system and this is what I aim to change. As students become educated, they should be allowed to think however they like and not be forced to think within the bounds of A, B, C, and D; they should be allowed to have their ideas discussed and considered, not immediately shut down because their answer may not be in the mainstream way of thinking about things.

I am fully aware that we cannot just sack the standardized tests—they are undeniably the most efficient way to assess the highest number of students. But the idea behind eradicating standardized tests is to eradicate the need for them. We need not just a reform, but a complete overhaul of the education system. We need to start over from scratch to create a learning environment that fills students with passion and prepares them for the world, not just for a test at the end of the year. Standardized tests are what are preventing students from having access to their full potential and acquiring a passion for knowledge and learning and life. Education researcher Gerald W. Bracey says that standardized tests cannot asses “creativity, critical thinking…curiosity…enthusiasm…resourcefulness, sense of beauty, [or] sense of wonder…” Each and every child has a different way of thinking and has the potential to be a divergent thinker, as proven in the aforementioned study on divergent thinking, and those abilities and ideas should not be crushed out of them, but allowed to grow and flourish.

Having been schooled in Virginia all my life, I have not been subject to the new education phenomenon: the Common Core. This program claims to prepare students for success in college and their careers, developing “critical-thinking, problem-solving, and analytical skills” and offering ways for students to be assessed throughout the year to make sure that they are where they should be. The Common Core standards are “aligned with college and career expectations.” Standardized tests are not the only problem; students are being pushed down academically successful paths. But the big question is, what determines success?

“Preparing America’s students for success.” These giant orange words take up the upper half of the Common Core’s homepage. But again, what is success? Success for me is very likely not the same thing as success is for you. A student could decide in elementary school that her passion is garbage collecting and she could carry that passion on through middle and high school and graduate and immediately apply for a job with the local garbage collecting agency. And to her, she has achieved her life goal, she has succeeded. But these days, it is shameful if students decide not to go to college, if they “settle” for a low-paying job. Our education system pushes students so hard in the direction that society thinks they should go that they hardly stop and take the time to consider what the children want and what their passions are.

We should not be educating students so that they eventually fit the socially accepted definition of success, but we should be educating them so that they will go through life retaining their natural abilities to have fun, to be creative, to be unique, to have ideas, and to pursue their dreams no matter what they are. To do this, teachers cannot be bound by obligatory standards and end-of-year standardized tests; they need to be free to teach their students in the best manner possible and that manner changes from year to year as the students change.

Things have changed drastically since the 1930s: businesses, expectations of youth, society, and, undeniably, the education system in general. Women are now allowed to go to school, the only universities worth going to are not just the Ivies, and there is a much broader range of educational opportunities available to everyone. Yet the SAT was first used in 1938 and has undergone few changes since its implementation seventy-six years ago. The students of 1938 were drastically different than the students of 2016. Color TV, alkaline batteries, commercial airplanes, MRIs, and most importantly, the Internet have all been invented since 1940. As Abraham Lincoln said in his annual message to Congress in 1862, “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.”

Good ol’ Abe his the nail on the head because in addition to properly educating our youth, teachers will need to be properly educated as well; you can’t teach what you don’t know. It may be too late now to revolutionize education in pre-secondary level institutions with the current teachers because of how long many of them have been in the system and how molded they are by it, but it’s not too late to start at the collegiate level. College professors are not bound by the same rules and standards that govern high school, middle school, and elementary school teachers; they are much freer to radically change their classrooms to enhance creativity and self-expression in future teachers so that they can pass on that learning to future students.

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”-William Butler Yeats. What is in your pail? Your stellar SAT scores? Your Harvard acceptance letter? Your extensive list of honors and awards? Those things are all well and good, but is your bucket filled with fire, a burning passion and a thirst for knowledge and life? You should leave school impassioned and bursting with a desire to exist and show the world what you can do, you should have your talents and ideas fueled throughout your education and built upon so that you can become an intelligent, passionate, creative member of society who is willing and able to be a nonconformist and a dreamer and a thinker. As toy impresario, wonder aficionado, and avid shoe wearer Mr. Edward Magorium informed us, “Your life is an occasion. Rise to it.”