Dear School, Please Give Me a Relevant Education!
Written by Ariya Kosavisutte (Pink) | Edited by Pollisa Tien-iam-arnan (Polly) | Designed by Pollisa Tien-iam-arnan (Polly) and Auliya Naura Telaumbanua
I’m sure there has been one point in our lives where we ask ourselves, “what am I doing with my life?”
For me, that happens on a daily basis. The endless cycle of waking up, going to school, rushing to finish our homework, staying up late till two in the morning, and falling asleep in class the next day. What are we doing with our lives?
Is all the effort really worthwhile? What are we doing all of this for?
Since the beginning of time, society has always told us to do well in school; to be the top of our class. As we grow older, our parents tell us to compete with other children to get into top universities so in the future we will make a good living. To a certain extent, all these things can be true. But did the experience of making it to the top have to be such a painful one?
The purpose of school is to provide students with the knowledge they need to sustain a life in the real world. Do we need to know how to calculate the derivative of 6x^2+ 15x^2 to do that? For the vast majority of us here, the answer is no…
Unless we all wanted to be engineers and mathematicians, we don't really need to know that skill. We also don’t need to know what product is formed when 3-methyl pentane-1,3,4-triol is heated under reflux with an excess of acidified potassium dichromate (VI). Unless, of course, we wanted to be a chemist or doctor.
Like what even is this stuff? I don’t need to know all that to know how to cook scrambled eggs for breakfast.
Of course, schools can argue that we need to know this excess knowledge for critical thinking. Totally. Critical thinking can come from solving problems that we experience on a daily basis. It's a skill we naturally acquire when we face challenges we find difficult to overcome.
I’m not saying we should form an anti-school protest or something. Rather, I believe it would be much more useful to teach students real-life skills as opposed to wasting 20 years of their lives cramming their brains with the information they’ll just forget once they complete that graduating exam.
Schools need to teach students something worthwhile that everyone can actually use to survive in the real world. Isn’t that what schools are for in the first place?
What do I mean by this? I’m talking about subjects like home economics.
Some of you may laugh at this, thinking it’s trivial and completely unnecessary or old fashioned. But hold that laugh for a moment because what you’re about to hear will shock you. It’s troubling to know that 30% of college students today don't even know how to boil an egg and 18% of millennials can’t do something as simple as making toast.
At this rate, don’t even mention the real world. How are we even going to survive a week into university away from our mothers and nannies that cook for us at home!? I can say this because I am one of those people who can’t cook for my life.
I find that we often look over some important knowledge in life because we spend too much time trying to memorize what’s in our textbooks so we can take the exam, get the grade, and make it to university.
Is that really the kind of success that gives us life fulfillment? For some maybe, but the sacrifices we had to make along the way make me question whether it really is what we should all be striving for.
A lot of millennials today can’t cook, sew, or manage their budgets. That’s why we’re young, dumb, and broke… We lack the ability to treat common illnesses on our own and freak out over a fever and spend excessive amounts of money at the hospital to get medicine that would cost 10 times less at the local pharmacy.
I’m not saying schools and governments are making a mistake here. They’re just ignoring something that could be crucial to the survival of the future generation of human beings. If something needs to change, it’s the educational system that fails to teach children the basic skills they need to live to the next day.
