Is School Helping Us Learn?By Eli Gerber (A friend of mine)
Speaking as a current high school student, I know one thing for certain: they sure do push the academics at this age. AP courses, honors classes and societies, and advanced programs (such as the IB program) are a virtual lock in every student’s schedule in the Montgomery County Public Schools system, which, considering the economic and educational standing of our area, is to be expected.
But are these heavy course loads really helping us learn?
Speaking as a student in one such advanced program, I can honestly say that I enjoy learning. Acquiring new knowledge, discussing new topics, discovering new ideas, these are all things that interest me deeply. However, the fashion in which we learn these things is the real problem. It does not lie in our teachers, administrators, counselors, or in ourselves. It lies in the idea that in order to go to a top-tier college, get a great job, and be successful in life, students these days must overload themselves with work that they may not find interesting and almost certainly will not use later in life.
I have friends planning on taking eight, nine, even ten AP courses in their high school careers. That is generally enough AP classes to go into college with enough credits to be considered a sophomore by academic standards. However, what is the price they must pay in order to attain the academic excellence that they do?
Last year, I learned that my emotional breakdowns were not uncommon; in fact, many of my friends also suffered from immense amounts of stress, often accompanied by feelings of inadequacy, or even hopelessness. Is it really worth it to put yourself through the ringer to try to take as many incredibly advanced classes as many of us do in order to try to get into a better college? Would it not be more fulfilling to operate in an environment that is, if not stress-free, then at least reduced stress, learning at the pace you want to learn at, learning what you want to learn?
In a school such as that, the hyper-motivated students would still excel, still take their dozen AP courses, and still get into upper echelon colleges, without forcing the rest of the academic world to keep up with them. I personally feel as though I would benefit immensely from being able to concentrate on the topics I am most interested in, without the added stress of classes that, while their information may be useful in some fields (i.e. multi-variable calculus for aspiring engineers), makes no sense to study in others (i.e. multi-variable calculus for aspiring theater majors). The fact of the matter is that not every child is as equally interested in the subjects that colleges weigh the most heavily (classes like English, science, and mathematics), and these children suffer because they will not take the same types of courses as students whose main concern is where they will be spending their four years of college. This does not make the students who do not make it into Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the like any less bright or capable than those who do; it means that the American schooling system is broken enough not to value the arts, philosophy, psychology, etc. programs as much as they do the three R’s: Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic. Now, all this brings to my mind is the question of whether schools are actually teaching us what we need to know, or if they are trying to box us all into these little science, English, and math obsessed packages who are real world ready when in fact, the real world has a lot more to throw at you than that.
Why is it that aspiring writers, actors, reporters, crime-fighting professors of symbology at Harvard, and everyone else who does not want to pursue a career involving math has to work incredibly hard in classes like AP Calculus to get into a college that will help them reach their goals? Why do engineers, architects, and scientists have to labor away in English instead of pursuing what truly interests them? It seems illogical that we have to spend 1/7 of our school year sitting in a class that does not interest and will not help us when we could instead dedicate that time to something that really piques our interests? Instead of having to stay in an advanced science for 45 minutes every day, why can’t we aspiring liberal arts majors take a theater class, a creative writing class, and art class, something that will be more thought-provoking and helpful than a class like AP Physics. Why can’t our future researchers at NIH take an extra science instead of sitting in English for 45 minutes every day? It seems to me that AP Biology will be more helpful for a future scientist than reading the collected works of Sophocles.
Understand that this is not a critique of any one particular class, teacher, subject, or school in particular. It is simply a criticism of the broken standards in American education today that force every student to study the same uniform subjects, regardless of interests or future aspirations. Unfortunately, it seems highly unlikely the system will ever change, so until the end of time, students will have to labor away in classes that, while good in theory, are ruined in practice.
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