Complaint from a Tired School-Goer (Complaints are not made for fun; they actually mean something is worth changing!)

This is a rant against the traditional education system.

This system cares not about the student's individual needs, wants, or even concerns. It was created to control, and has achieved that objective for decades, frustrating thousands upon thousands of children who spent their prime years, the years when they should have been allowed to embrace the world with all their natural curiosity and courage, chained with an invisible ball-and-chain to the constraints of society's narrow-minded education system. Worst still, it has confined perceptions of intelligence and ability within those of the paper and pencil evaluation system. In other words, a person's worth is derived by the grades they get on test papers that might or might not truly evaluate what they have learned.

I for one, in the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom, initiated my own enrollment back into this system that I had grown up hating without even knowing it. And after almost 4 years of applying as open a mind as I possibly can at this stage in my life, I have come to realize that the only reason why I should stick it in and finish what I started, is that society has not changed enough to embrace a person with many ideas and abilities, but too little paper qualifications to back it up! (Plus, having knowingly slaved within this system for that many years, I might as well just endure it for a half a year more.)

So I find myself caged in, surrounded by an insurmountable amount of knowledge available to me, not just through the required and recommended textbooks, but also through the bombardment of the information age – particularly the internet.
And I ask myself, what is the point of paying good money just to have information thrown at me so I can regurgitate it back out within those few months, and forget most of what I "learnt" in the end. Especially when the information thrown at me in the classroom can so easily be attained by buying books on my own, or browsing the internet. As I sit in some of my classes, I am suddenly taken back to my secondary school days, when I would sit in my classroom, quiet, un-rebelling, but with bored and angry thoughts in my head about what the point of all this useless information was to me.

My pet peeve is when students are treated as some kind of information-absorbing machine that is taught what to remember, and even how to remember… but not taught why it is important to be remembered. The ongoing question in my mind as a teenager struggling with the suffocating school system and syllabus was simply "WHY?". Information was just useless information to me as long as it wasn't meaningful. And unfortunately, I must admit, that not many teachers were able to convince me as to why a certain piece of information, or learning a certain skill would be meaningful to my life. My curiosity was not piqued, in fact, most of the time, I felt that my individual voice was being routinely and progressively squashed by the way the education system works.

One day, I was driving down a hill, enjoying the breeze and watching the trees sway in the wind, when I thought of something. Instead of being given assignment after assignment to do at home, after a full day's worth of information bombardment, I would so much rather ponder on a single concept or idea which forms the basis of where the information stems from.

The biggest failure in our education system, in my opinion, is that it fails to intrigue and engage the individual's imagination, and hence allow personal creativity in the way we learn.

This is why, I have vowed to myself never to simply throw knowledge at a learner, but instead to impart the curiosity to seek that knowledge, and then teach the skills to gather that knowledge.

As the clock ticks towards the end of my studies in college, I wonder where the next chapter of my life will lead me.

But I must admit, that if there's anything I come away with from this current education system, it is that I have made my own choice about how I will approach learning and teaching in any future endeavors I might encounter in this area.