Why School Makes Us Stupid You Know ?

 Does anybody else find it insane how much ofour childhood we spend in a classroom? As soon as you’re old enough to be in aroom without shitting your pants Bam! You’re just thrown into kindergarten! And from that day until you’re 18 school becomes your full time job. 5 days a week, 10 months a year, for 14 years. And even then it’s still not over! Because if you want a job other than servingfries, well lucky you! You get to spend 4 more years in college or university! In that amount of time getting “educated”you’d think we’d all be geniuses walking around contemplating Shakespeare’s use ofmetaphors, while simultaneously calculating the parabola of the sun’s descent in orderto figure out the time we should head home to our wife who’s waiting with a protractorto see if tonight we can achieve an obtuse angle in the bedroom, rather than acute. Well obviously something went wrong because last time I checked our world is littered with dumb people Like, I constantly find myself being blownaway reading emails by how many people lack basic writing skills. Or the amount of people in line at a store who can’t do the simplest math to calculate their change Yet all these people spent years in school, so what happened? The problem is that we’renot “learning” we’re just regurgitating. Because we're only taught what we need to know topass a test, not pass at life. So for years we repeat this cycle of constantlymemorizing useless facts for a grade. And then forgetting it all a few days latersince by then we’ve gone and "Secure empty trash" that shit from our minds to makeroom for the next batch of useless information. Information that today you’d just Googleif you really needed to know. Also now that I’m an adult I can officiallyconfirm what we all knew as kids. And that’s nearly everything we’re taughthas never applied once in my everyday life! And believe it or not I was actually an Astudent. Yet now when I look back at my tests and assignments, I have no cluewhat any of this crap is. So if what we’re being taught has no use in our adult lives, then what use does a kid have learning it? I mean there I am, my balls haven’t evendropped yet I’m learning equations to calculate the density of my balls and the speed ofthe drop. A big reason why I believe our world is fullof so many uneducated people is because school kills our desire to want to learn. Education becomes something we all quicklylearn to hate. Which is really sad because you’d thinkeducation is something kids would enjoy. When you’re a kid you’re new to the planet and you have a million questions about everything It’s why we bug our parents all day asking“why this mommy” and “why that". But once school begins that curiosity quicklyfades and we stop asking “why” and we start asking “whyyyy” It also doesn't help that school doesn’ttake consideration into what we want to learn about. Even subjects you didn’t care for, if they were taught in a more engaging way you might have realized a whole passion you never thought you had, changing your entire direction in life. To this day I’ll often come across a randomsubject from elementary school again, like say ancient Egypt and I’ll think, “Holy shit, how did they build the pyramids?" "This is mind blowing!”. But back then you didn’t care because itwasn’t taught in an interesting way. And you were so busy memorizing the spellingof people’s names, the years of birth and other random useless facts, that you had no time to actually be interested in what you were learning about. By the way, fuck Shakespeare. Every single year from grade 6 until my second year of university I had a class where we spent some time studying Shakespeare. I mean, why? The writing is over 400 years old! Back then English was like a different language. It still makes no sense to me to this day. If you want kids to maybe get something out of English class, maybe give them something that’s actually written in English! Oh my god, genius! Also I am convinced if Shakespearewrote in modern day English teachers would find the stories disgusting. It would be like reading prequelsto Fifty Shades of Grey in class. But I guess the lesson here is if you writeanything in old-fashioned English then thou can say anything and thee who come hither to question thy writing skills shall be banished from whence thee came. And that’s a big problem with school. So much of what we’re taught isabout the world of past and so little has anything to do with our present world. And isn’t that the whole point of school,to prepare us for the world ahead of us? Not behind us? Look I’m not against school. I think the idea of school is great. In fact some of my best memories are beingaround all random weird people you’d meet through the years at school. My issue with school is with the system ofhow we’re taught. Because how much can you truly learn beingsurrounded by four walls each day? And then you get home and you can’t evenrelax because you have hours of homework to do. And it leaves us with no time to actually just clear ourminds and think or explore the world firsthand. And isn’t that what education should reallybe about? Instead school teaches us not to questionwhat we’re taught, to abide by the textbook, think within the box of a rubric, and do what the teacher says like they're some almighty authority figure! It’s no wonder when we graduate we squareon our head, just to make sure everyone knows how great we are at thinking inside the box. It feels like the goal is to raise us to besuitable employees, not suitable people. When you think about it school kind of feelslike a giant practice run of waking up at unhealthy hours every morning 5 days a week,so we can get used to that 9-5 lifestyle. And then to ensure we transition into that9-5 life we have to pay tens of thousands of dollars just to go to college or universitywhich puts many people in debt and forces many to start working jobs they hate right away. Education is the most importantpart of our lives because it builds the foundation of who we are as people. And I think a lot of the problems with today’sworld are a result of our poor education system. Because when your education system creates uninformed people, with no curiosity to learn, who are forced to work jobs they hateto pay debt from school, well it’s no wonder our world is a mess. A video by Spencer Cathcart