AUSTIN FOLKERTSMA
campus editor
austin.folkertsma@my.tccd.edu
Students waste too much time learning stuff they don’t need in the “real-world.”
Have you ever caught yourself sitting in the middle of math class thinking this will never be of any benefit in the future? You’re not alone. There have been countless times when other people have had that same thought.
America’s education system is wasting children’s valuable time, teaching them things that will not be used by the student ever again. School can be fun, to some extent, but only when learning something that is of interest. Time is valuable. Life’s too short to be doing something that’ll waste time.
A journalist isn’t going to need to know what the quadratic formula is, and a chemist isn’t going to need to know who built the pyramids. So much valuable time is being wasted doing something redundant when that time can be used for something useful.
What if people learned the basics of every subject from kindergarten through eighth grade, and then in ninth through twelfth, focus shifts to life skills and college prep?
Yes, there are schools out there with some of the same qualities described, but it shouldn’t be limited to a few schools. It should be available for all schools, both private and public.
I want to learn how to sow or how to cook. Also, learning how to file taxes, balancing a checkbook or budgeting could be a useful tool to navigate for generations to come. I don’t recall ever learning how to do any of these things back in high school.
Certain things are offered at TCC like learning how to interview or how to build a resume, but people shouldn’t have to wait for 18, sometimes 19, years to do those things in college.
School isn’t even about learning anymore, it’s about passing. It was a common fear that if a student received a failing grade, then when they got home, the parents would’ve dealt out some type of punishment.
If people want children to care more about learning, then they need to design some sort of tool or method that nurtures that.
To function as a society, people should have the basis and shared understanding of how the world works. It isn’t immediately practical to know Roman history and how nuclear power works, but societies function better when the masses aren’t ignorant of basic general knowledge.
The U.S. education system is all but functional because children aren’t being taught what they want to learn. Students study for a little while, then as soon as the test is over, all of that knowledge they just learned is shoved out of their minds to make room for the next useless crap taught to them.
No wonder so many Americans deal with mental illnesses. There’s too much pressure to succeed because people don’t want to seem like failures. If a student is taught something they want to learn, chances are they will excel better in those areas. So much of the older generation influences us, but what the older generations fail to realize is that times are changing.
