The Struggles of Cutthroat Education

By: BRIANA CANET '17
PTS Falconer Guest Contributor

Wake up, eat, school, extracurricular activities, homework, study, sleep, and repeat. That is the daily, monotonous life of a student. Do not fail. Do not get nervous. You need to be the top student. You have no choice but to do well. Fight the tears and the pain. But ask yourself: Will this all be worth the immense and constant struggle? Hopefully, it will, but that is not guaranteed.

How many times have you remained awake past midnight completing homework assignments? How many times have you studied vigorously for a test and ended up not doing as well as you hoped? How many times have you felt like giving up on academics? Probably more times than you would willingly admit. But why do we -worrisome students- endure this horrendous routine and suffering? Just for three heavenly digits. We all constantly strive for that magic number; the number that scholars greatly strain to attain. The noteworthy number is one hundred -a perfect score.

School has become a merciless, unhealthy competition, and the whole game consists of who is beating whom. We have become horses blinded of all the struggles, constantly racing to be the victor. Therefore, has this unexplainable stress in obtaining the ideal grade to outscore your peers distracted us from truly comprehending and absorbing the material? Yes. We all must face this evident fact -both teachers and students.

Cram, memorize, regurgitate, and forget the material. Numerous students all around the country spend uncountable hours engaged in this ritual: Shoving vast amounts of material into their brains in the hopes that they will retain the information just long enough to spit everything onto a final exam. Once this act of expulsion ceases, the information vanishes from their heads. What is the point of studying if the material disappears a few hours after you have completed the exam? To receive an acceptable grade. We have stripped education of its core principle: true absorption of a topic. The values of education have been replaced by the grade given -not earned.

The plethora of pressures in attaining a respectable grade has shattered the basis of education: processing, comprehending, and saving the information. In fact, we have developed a routine of memorizing information in order to gradually forget about it in a few hours because we -the students- have belittled the high education system bestowed to us. Instead of absorbing information for critical employment, we endeavor to obtain the grade at whatever cost, enduring endless amounts of sleep deprivation, anxiety, and distress. Students have transformed into horses with blinders inadvertently obstructing their view of the rest of their world, solely focused on winning the race. We must not be blinded by the grade that we receive. Instead, we must dare to focus on the most important component of education: truly learning.