Is School Worth it?

Hello :)

It's back to school season and I figured it would be about time to give some of my thoughts on the school system, whether it works, is it all worth it and so on. I'm currently in university, starting my third year and at the moment at least planning on going two more years after I've got my Bachelor's degree, so I think that already sets the tone for this post.

I have always put a lot of work into my education because it's something that I value and something that I feel nobody can really take away from me. I'm certain I won't use every single bit of information that I have learned during the past 14 years in school, but everything that I have learned has benefitted me nonetheless.

I think that school can be stressful and tiring and I'm not going to lie I don't love it every single day, but ultimately I enjoy learning new things. I don't think that the point of going to school is to necessarily know and use all of the things that you are told, it's more about being able to use your creative thinking, understand deadlines, get proper work ethics and just develop your brain so that you could manage in difficult situations.

I know that it's easy to say that I'm never going to need to use logarithms or integrals or I don't have to know the exact year of every single historical event, especially if you find those things difficult. I know that for me sports class was always difficult, I wasn't an athletic kid and I was also always so much smaller than others, being not good at sports events made me feel quite sad as a child, because I felt like I was trying so hard, but I was still the worse at it. I can imagine other people found something else difficult, may it be math or languages or science, and they probably felt just as bad if they did not succeed in those areas or maybe they didn't care, I can't say for sure. I can just say for myself that if I'm good at something or feel like with some practice I can improve easily, then I feel so much more motivated to do those things.

I can's say that the school system is perfect, there were definitely certain situations that made me feel stressed, often the speed of going through different themes was rather fast-paced and that's just related to the amount of information that the teachers have to give in a limited amount of time. I assume that as time goes on the amount of knowledge that is considered basic is only going to get bigger because we're constantly learning more. Perhaps adding some mandatory study time would improve that, but I feel like most students would not be happy about it. However, I definitely feel like there's quite a strict schedule that teachers have to stick to in order to teach everything that's on their list and because of that it can cause it to be difficult for students to keep up.

There's obviously the possibility to take extra lessons, go to help classes and talk to teachers, but I know that if I already spend 8 hours at school, a few hours for homework, another hour just goes for transport, I also try to get 7-8 hours of sleep, then it isn't very tempting to spend my few hours of free time going to extra classes. If it's important for you, then you'll make the time, but most young people have other things that seem very important at the time.

University is very different from the previous years that I have gone through, there are a lot more homework and less of actually going to classes, there are fewer tests, but you have to know more for those tests that you do have and some subjects only have exams that determine your entire grade. I feel like in some classes my grade depended entirely on how much luck I had. Especially ones, where everyone has to answer different questions since the questions have a different level of difficulty for each person and you may know the answer to every other question, but not the one you got, and that's just your luck. Also if there are optional answer tests, some people may have a good score simply by guessing and being right, that doesn't mean that they know more, they were just lucky and because of that, I feel like tests are sometimes a bad measure of knowledge.

For me having to answer questions orally is also a lot more stressful, I enjoy thinking things through and making sure that what I'm saying is correct, but for others, they feel like they can talk their way out of anything, so again it all depends on the person. That's why I feel like teaching and testing all people in the exact same way isn't always fair, but life isn't fair either, so I guess it a least teaches something. 

As a conclusion, I guess what I'm trying to say is that school isn't always great, but whether you want to admit it or not, it does benefit you and I feel like it's worth it. Mind you, right now it is the Summer, once the exam season is at full speed, I will probably feel a bit differently...

Feel free to leave any of your thoughts in the comment section below, I hope this post was somewhat interesting and see you in our next one.

Kaiela :)