School isn't all it's cracked up to be...

School doesn’t teach you the important things in life; it doesn’t teach you how to pay bills or how to use a washing machine- it teaches you irrelevant information; information that you will spend a whole year learning, repeating and recalling for an exam. You will then get into that exam and you have to take a deep breath and open your exam paper- just to see that dreaded question, the question that you have been praying won’t come up. But it has. Your heart sinks and your face drops – you try to remember the lessons that you were taught it in, the evenings that you spent revising it. You close your eyes and attempt to recall it – but you can’t. So you do the thing that you never, ever want to have to do – you improvise; you try to remember anything, anything that may be even remotely relevant – and for what? A piece of paper at the end of the year, telling you that you didn’t do as well as you wanted to – telling you that you will not be going to the university that you want to – telling you that you wasted two whole years revising pointless information for pointless exams. Telling you that you just aren’t quite good enough, and that you will never be quite good enough. Yeah... it hurts.

90% of the information that we are taught in school is completely pointless; they don’t teach you important, worthy knowledge. They teach you how to pass an exam – nothing else. They don’t teach you how to cope with the disappointment of knowing that you have spent every night for six months revising the same irrelevant information for no reason – because you failed all four of your A levels. They don’t teach you that at school. They teach you how to annotate a poem and how earthquakes are caused – or how the sympathomedullary pathway is a biological process involved in the stress response. Information that may be interesting at the time; but, in 10 years time, are you really going to think about your A levels? The information that you have spent every day learning for the past two years; the information that you have now forgotten – the information that comes under such a complex topic title that you cannot actually remember it.

School is seen as a social institution that sets you up for the rest of your life – an institution in which you spend the ‘best’ years of your life. Well, I tell you now – if these are the best years of our lives, then we are in for a long, miserable journey. School really isn’t what it is made out to be. It isn’t the happy place that parents assume it is; it’s a place that you walk into everyday – a place in which everyone stares at you, and judges you. A place that you spend all day trying to get out of because it is miserable; it is a place that limits everything that you do and controls you more than you would ever believe.

School really isn’t what people think it is...