We the Children
The American system of educating youth is despicable. It is a dangerous and menacing threat to the physical and psychological well-being of the budding citizens of the United States and yet—it is rarely spoken of. Hardly mentioned.
Not worth the time. There are rumors of a new plague infecting the teenagers of America at an alarming pace. Have you heard of it? They call it the apathy epidemic. What it does is it takes us—the teenagers—and turns into these knife-carrying, society-loathing, drug-coveting, sick human beings who would rather float through life stoned out of our minds than take initiative and decide that we do have a voice, we do have power, and that we are going to change the source of our mental excruciation into a benign and useful asset. The education system currently in place in the United States as a whole has little respect for creativity, character, individuality, and the nurturing and raising of Good, Just and Healthy young adults.
Before these enormously important traits we put test scores, the financial impact of test scores, the numerous numbers, logistics and possible out-comes of the extensively long list of things all of which have very little to do with the students themselves. At extremely young ages we are tested, tested on our physical fitness, on our language skills, our math, science, social studies and history skills, our geography knowledge… And that alone is the Decider, the Judge. What are you worth in life? Are you an A or a C? Are you a B or an F? Are you good enough? Will you be happy and successful? Will you make money and have a family? Or will you be a failure? There is a horribly powerful and insistent push, a drive, an immeasurable pressure placed on children to conform to what society tells you is The Ideal Life. Starting before the age of 10 teachers start to assign homework. And little by little it increases until you leave school simply to go home and do 4 more hours of work, because if you don’t do it, then what are you? You must be a slacker, you must be lazy and stupid.
If you keep it up you’ll most likely end up a bum begging for booze money in bus stops, because America is a one way track: you do what They say, and you’ll be Happy and Successful. Inevitably your free time is taken up by math equations and Napoleon Bonaparte and the colonization of Africa because these things are much more important than discovering and shaping yourself, more important than learning how to distinguish right from wrong, even more important than learning how to do your own laundry and wash your own dishes. I mean, right? As far as I’m aware, the point of school is to educate you, to answer your questions and pique your curiosities, to help you explore the world and yourself, to broaden your horizon and enable you to pursue your passions. Yet, this ideal situation has fallen aside, and school has instead become a place where you are pressured to constantly perform, to meet expectations, to work and work and work, and stress and worry and if it all pans out right you’ll be turned into a robot programmed to fit the criteria that some politician somewhere decided was convenient. Now do you see how this is affecting us? How it entraps us in a system that is near guaranteed to cause us unhappiness? We the children of America, are being greatly wronged, and I believe is time for us to do something about it.
