What I Learned From School

What is the most important thing you learned from school?

The purpose of schools is education and knowledge.  We go to school to learn.  However, over the centuries, schools seem to have lost their purpose and meaning.  During classes, students just look forward to breaks, meal times, or the end of classes.  They attend classes because to stay out of trouble and get good grades, which have also lost their purpose and meaning.

Homework and assignments help students learn with practice while tests determine how much they learn.  However, the purpose has now shifted to assigning grades, compare scores, and see who goes on or who drops out, especially at college and higher levels of education.  Not only do grades no longer determine how much people learn, but they also promote competition, cheating, jealousy, arrogance, depression, and conflicts.  Most of the time, students are not learning.  They cram or cheat to get A’s or just pass their tests and classes, but afterwards, they forget most of the material.

Instructors, especially college professors, have also forgotten their purpose of teaching.  Most are just doing it for the money, and do not care if students understand or learn anything.  Many are bad role models, often are improper, rude, and biased.  They use foul language, insult students when they don’t understand something, play favorites, or don’t know when to be objective.  They are not qualified for their positions.  School losing its purpose is one of the important things I learned from it.

Another important thing I learned is that we learn more outside of class than in class, especially in preschool, kindergarten, elementary school, and college.  During our first few years in school, we are starting to become independent for daily life by being away from our family for a few hours everyday.  During those school hours, we learn to physically feed ourselves, communicate outside the family, and other daily routines.  When we leave home for college, we enter the adult world on our own.  This requires us to master many duties and tasks, such as setting up accounts, paying bills, knowing our resources, and many other real life things, especially the social aspects.  What we learn in most college classes ends up unused.

In all, the most important things I learned from school is that it has lost its meaning, and you learn more outside of classes than inside them.  When I reached graduate and professional schools, I began learning in classrooms what I would use in my life.