I was the first person to review this dumpster fire of a school, back when I was 13. I'm 15 now, and I've moved on to high school, so I figured I'd make this retrospective review again, now that I've left.
I've stopped caring about people cursing so much. I also stopped having emotional breakdowns. I think the reason I cared in the first place was that I grew up in a family where cursing wasn't allowed, so the people doing it so much felt to me like they were anarchists who loved breaking the rules. I've since gotten thicker skin to shield these cursing breakdowns I used to have.
But something I now DO care about is how stupid the assignments and grades and stuff are. This isn't just a problem at this school; it's more of a problem in most schools around the country. But the curriculum is so broken. We just spend hours memorizing facts to spit back out when we take the test. We memorize a bunch of facts, recite that information on tests, and then forget it, so we can memorize more information to recite on tests, and then forget it, so we can memorize more information to recite on tests, and then forget it, SO WE CAN MEMORIZE MORE INFORMATION TO RECITE - ok, I think you get it.
We always tell our teachers and parents that a lot of the things we learn in school will never help us in the future. What they always say in response is something along the lines of, "Yeah, you may not need it. But you DO need to learn how to learn." Oh, so you call sitting in chairs super neatly put into grid-like formations, writing down exactly what we're told to on our note page, and doing exactly the things we are told to do by the teachers, "learning how to learn"? You really call THAT learning how to learn?!
98% of children aged 4 - 5 are classified as creative geniuses. But funnily enough, only 2% of adults are classified as creative geniuses. What's up with that? Why did the percentage shrink by 49 times? Could it be the school's fault? Definitely. School teaches us to obey, not to think. If you asked a 7-year-old to write a few paragraphs about airplanes, it would probably be really jovial, bouncy, and fun to read. But if you asked a college student to write a few paragraphs about airplanes, it would look about equivalent to something ChatGPT could generate. AI is going to replace a lot of our jobs here eventually, and AI is constantly getting smarter. But you know what we, humans, have that AI could never have? Creativity! So it makes NEGATIVE sense that schools suppress it rather than nurture it!
Long story short, school doesn't make us smarter. It makes us DUMBER.
Take this brag alert, but I can list off many useful skills I have, verbatim. I can code with Python, I can produce awesome music, write decent stories, especially for my age, that people will stick around reading until the end, name every country recognized by the United Nations and the capitals of said countries (though I am a bit rusty with the capitals), make five-minutes-plus, non-clickbait, non-brainrot YouTube videos across FIVE channels that get up to 235 THOUSAND VIEWS, and I have a stronger vocabulary than 99% of people I know of at my age.
With those skills I just mentioned, I could be a software engineer, a game designer, a music producer who sells his music, a freelance song commission-taker, which I already plan on being soon, an author, a linguist, a YouTuber, a video editor, and/or so many more things! And my skillset is definitely only going to grow and get better as I get older!
But as long as I can't solve for x, school doesn't give a crap about any of that. School always assumes really terribly of our abilities and what we want to do when we grow up; I don't want to be a mathematician, a historian, or someone who studies million-year-old rocks and finds out where they come from (no offense to anyone who does want to be those things). But school just assumes I want to be all of those, not one at a time, but all at once! It is for all of these reasons that I blame all of these problems of mine on THE SCHOOL.
Wow. I can't believe I ranted like that. Idk, have a good day I guess lol read more