The corruption of the education system

This is the second of a two-part series. See the first part at tcextra.com or in last week’s paper. The stress coming from all directions harms students in many ways. On top of school and all that applies to it, teenagers often are encouraged or forced to work a regular job. When students are not returning home until late in the evening or night, they run short on time to study or do homework. As a result, students must stay up late into the night, creating a common lack of proper sleep. In one of the ironies of high school, health class teaches us that, in order to maintain healthy sleeping habits, a teenager must get nine and a quarter hours of sleep every night. However, the average amount of sleep for every student is far less because they are forced to work late into the night on their homework, including health assignments. There is no question as to why kids come into the school without their minds at full throttle. Society practically steals the lives of teenagers in their 11th- and 12th-grade years. Drug abuse may be a result of experimentation, but couldn’t it also be linked to the need for an escape for many young adults? With the pressures from school and work and the social expectations that our society puts on teens, the suicide rate has become very high. Every 100 minutes, a U.S. teen commits suicide in what is the third leading cause of death among people from 14 to 25 years old. Is this corruption of society and education a new curse? I have no way of knowing from experience. However, there was a time in recent American history when money was not of top concern. During the 1960s and 1970s, the youth of the nation began a musical revolution in which the music was appreciated for what it was, not for how much profit it made. The people also began protests, many of which were in the music, for world peace. For once, finances were not the primary driving force among a large part of the society. Perhaps this generation of no-good, life-wasting, drug-addled hippies wasn’t so bad after all.Regardless, when a baby enters the world, he or she is carefree, excited and compelled to learn more and more about the world. When those same children enter school and the pressures to be the best begin to mount, this desire ceases to exist. As a result, all of us students miss a crucial development of our brains. Middle and high school standardizes each student to the same basis of knowledge and social characteristics. However, when applying to colleges, adolescents are told to describe how they are different. To students, my advice is to not worry so strictly about this race. Discover what you truly enjoy or are fascinated by and pursue it by taking classes concerning that topic, even if it means missing out on an AP course that would be useful to impress colleges. In today’s applications to liberal arts colleges, exploratory programs are the most popular by far. Students are so busy worrying about their grades they forget to find what interests them most. Now, to be honest, I am scared to enter the world without any idea of what I want to do with my life. To parents, I say do not be so uptight with your children when they receive poor grades in a course that does not seem to interest them at all. To teachers, don’t put out simple tests and quizzes solely for the purpose of getting more material to attach numbers to the students. Give exams or prompts that require a thorough understanding of the curriculum and, best yet, relate the curriculum to personal experience. Not all classes I have taken have been taught in such a manner. During my sophomore year, my English 10H class had few random quizzes. For the most part, we only wrote essays, dissected novels and listened to the teacher’s philosophical rants. However, I feel I learned more in that class than any other. This year, I took the Philosophy of War originally because I knew it was an H course. To my benefit, it revealed to me many current conflicts and the possible strategies being used in them. But the majority of courses at school do not have this sort of eye-opening effect. This is because students do not care whether they learn but rather if they achieve their own, parents’, teachers’ and all of society’s expectations. The people of this nation need to be less concerned with money and more driven by passion. This, I believe, would not only change our young adults but would also begin to cure many of our culture’s hidden problems. After all, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” Gabe Lefferts, son of Halleck and Theresa Lefferts of Salisbury, is a senior at Housatonic Valley Regional High School and will be graduating in June.