The current school system as it exists today in most places around the world panders to a narrow futuristic vision of capitalism.
Every day, we float through lessons like wraiths, functioning on often less than the recommended eight hours of sleep and copious amounts of caffeine. We sit through classes, frantically scribbling down any information that works its way through the sleep-haze, hoping desperately that we’re not missing something that we might need later. When some teachers expand on topics, hoping to share something interesting that they hope will pique the interest of the group of students in front of them, there’s always at least one hand up: “Will this be on the exam?” We refuse to share notes with classmates, knowing that they are our direct competition.
We trudge through the day, juggling service requirements and leadership roles and music lessons and writing workshops. We push ourselves to do just one more sport, try out for one more play, become the head of one more activity. We send emails to anyone who might be listening, pore through Facebook pages and Linkedins for networking, start clubs that we barely care about, all so we can put one more thing on our grand list that sums up the past four years of our lives.
Emails after emails pour into our packed inboxes. University talks, occupation lectures, career fairs. Sign up here to fulfil these points! We memorise and memorise and memorise, chemical equations and historic events and mathematical formulae and verb conjugation and literature quotes, and then vomit it all out onto the forty-five minute paper, our hands cramping painfully as our handwriting slowly deteriorates from perfectly printed letters to an illegible scrawl. Barely enough time to write a full essay before time is up, let alone come up with coherent thoughts. We wake up sweating from dreams about missing exams, nightmares of failure, panic attacks swirling in between the tuition sessions and binge-watches of sitcoms for the hundredth time, only for it to all be blamed on those pesky iPhones. Kids nowadays need to go outside more! We stare wistfully out of our windows, the pull of studies shackling us to our desks.
We break our backs studying, hunched over pages of long, colourful notes, looking at our computer screens for hours on end as the sun shines cheerfully in a distant world, one that lies out of our reach. As we leave the exam hall, we calculate all the marks we could have missed, numbers transforming into percentages, praying that the bell curve will be kind, the information we just wrote vanishing from our heads like sand in an hourglass. Who is all this memorisation helping? When will we use those facts and statistics again? When will I need to know the integral of ln(x), or that Hitler became Chancellor on the 30th of January, 1933? Why do literature exams refuse to allow us the text, forcing us to cram as many quotes as we can from one book into the “few cubic centimeters inside our own brains” instead of spending time understanding said excerpts? Future occupations aren’t going to expect us to file tax returns without looking at accounting books.
At the end of it all, most of us apply to university. We dig deep into our souls, pulling out every mildly traumatic moment and character-building experience and stories where we come out well but not too well. We give our entire lives to the display, spin our identities to make ourselves more sellable, more appealing, and then pay to get rejected. We are constantly pitted against each other, never-ending cycles of competition, failure, and self-hatred. We are so consumed by expectations from the people around us and ourselves, so consumed with the hunger to be something, that our vision narrows to only see one path ahead of us - the path we are expected to follow.
How can we be peaceful, at one with ourselves, if our entire lives are made up of chasing after something better? How can we truly live in the present if we’re constantly calculating, planning, regretting every move? We as a society have set ourselves and our future generations up for extreme unhappiness. As many philosophers have concluded, humans are simply not meant to live this way. We are meant to be detached from worldly possessions and titles - we should not be expected to constantly look back on a few pivotal moments that affect our futures.
Too young, we are told constantly. Too young to be tired, too young to be depressed, too young to look into our futures with such deadened eyes. Dark circles hang heavy enough to carry our pain. Our shoulders ache from the weight of the pressure on us. And as we peer out into repetition of the present that lies ahead of us, we are reminded: we are the lucky ones.
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