Society Lied: The Most Important Thing In Life Is Not School

I am currently a high school senior and after a very hard day today, I did some self-reflecting and feel the need to share something I’ve always felt. Now that I’m ending my high school career, I think it’s about time that I expressed what being in school has actually taught me. The goal of this article/post is to address society’s misconstrued belief that how well you do in high school or any school determines your intelligence, likelihood to succeed, and just about everything else that your future self will need to have a “good” or “decent” life.
A couple of days ago I was talking to my little brother, who’s in the fourth grade, and he was telling me about what he was learning at school. He explained how he had gone on a field trip into the woods to learn about dirt and plants and rain, outdoorsy science stuff. As he talked about the things he learned, he began talking about acid rain and it was like a light bulb had been lit in my head or more accurately a wildfire of ideas had begun. This spark of an idea was that in the past 8 to 9 years of school that I’ve been through, I’ve learned the basic things every year with one or two years of added knowledge to catch me off guard. But as I went over what I had learned, the stuff in my science class from last year was the exact information (with a some big girl words) my brother was learning—a fourth grader! The point of this story leads into what I’m going to talk about, which also ties into the title: school is not the most important thing in life.
Think about this. If you’ve ever asked an adult for help with math, whether it was with fractions or with solving an equation with the distance formula, you might have heard them say something along the lines of, “I haven’t done this in years.” When my mom told me that, I went straight to my teacher and asked plainly “Why am I learning something I won’t remember or need to remember in 10 years?” And almost every year after that time I’ve asked my math teachers the same question. They usually dodged it by saying something about measuring roofs or cutting boxes or something. A big percentage of people have hard with numbers; ask the next person in your math class or at work or a friend. Math isn’t always or easy to understand. And until recently, after I got a decent teacher to explain the voodoo like information, I thought that math was created by the devil. Okay, that could be an exaggeration but it was that bad. The truth is, when I go to the grocery store or if I’m making a project using math, I use the most basic kind. That’s all I need. And if I did want to find out how long I drove to get in to town, I’d check my GPS.
Now these two scenarios about science and math, about learning nothing new and learning things you won’t generally use, are the basics of my argument. As a current senior in high school, there’s the constant pressure to get straight into college so I can live my life in the status quo: high school, college, graduate school, job, marriage, children, soccer mom, horrible pension, no social security, and death(with few fond memories along the way and a fifty percent chance of divorce). I asked a number of my friends if they thought I was crazy for wanting to take a year off before college. Their answers for the majority of them were yes. “Why not just get it over with?”, one of them said to me. And my thought was, if I lived my life trying to get things over with then there would be very little to live for. Life shouldn’t be about getting through high school so you can get in to college, to get through college, to get into graduate school…, and so on and so forth. It should be about finding the way to fulfill a need in yourself and finding a way to use it to better others. That’s a simple enough thought to live by. So why don't more people live by it? Because it’s taught and enforced that school is equal to learning. It isn’t. Maybe when you’re reading and writing in third grade, where your teacher wants you to learn new things and be involved in the classroom and books and whatever the hell you’re learning, that’s true. But for me, completing endless amount of worksheets and scantron tests is tiring and depressing and isn’t learning, but it is my current definition of school. The truth is I take the initiative to learn about the things I care about and thanks to Google I’m learning all the time, without a test or worksheet in sight.
School is a day care center. It lets parents keep their children in a “safe” environment for the day, while they work. It’s a place where the people in charge, as you get older, stop having ideas to make learning interesting and stop expanding subjects to learn about. Don’t get me wrong, school is great for developing socialization with others or lack thereof, but that happens in day cares too. All I’m saying is that at present this is how I want my life to go: high school, take a year of mandatory college classes to get them out the way(have a job, too), leave college and take a year or two off to explore the world and help others, return to college with what I want to do with my life, get a degree, start a business, have friends, lose friends, never get married, only have children if pregnancy occurs as an adult over 30, and never once regret my decisions because life doesn’t have a rewind button. Now these things are my ideal, but I have a backup plan and if one doesn’t work out then I’ll try something else. But you can bet that I will fight my way not to get through my life but to live through my life the way it should be. If that’s the last thing I do. My advice is to expand you. Put yourself in the shoes of Julia Roberts in Eat, Pray, Love. She led an unhappy life and decided to do something about it, she traveled, and found God, and found love. That’s me, not exactly me, but the moral is the same. If life gives you lemon don’t make lemonade (it’s tart and makes you thirsty), find a way to make a sweet lemon cake and eat it like it’s the last thing you’ll ever eat in your life. I don’t want to be 46 when I start my journey, I want my journey to start now and school won't be at its center. I want to do things outside the box and be embarrassed and laugh till my sides hurt. I want to bike around Brussels and learn Portuguese. I want spend money getting learning about things I’m passionate about and doing those things forever. I want to do everything and nothing. That’s it. The fixed plan may fail, plans often do. I may have to restart my life time and time again. I may lose all my money (hey, I don’t have any now). Some people may leave me. Some people may not. As cliché as this sounds, I’m going to live the best life I can live, no matter what. Will you?