A Mildly Passive Aggressive Rant by: Noah Fischer

Public education- in theory it seems great right? Kids get to go to school every day, they get for the most part a complete education to prepare them for whatever path they go down, we get to socialize every day and all at no cost. But in reality, not so great. Just to make myself completely transparent, this is not a diss to teachers or anyone of the sort, this is more my problems with the system itself.

We're supposed to go to school for an education but I can say with complete confidence in my 10 years of schooling I have learned next to nothing. And that's not to say that teachers aren't doing their jobs, because I've passed every class I've taken. But therein lies the problem, we come to school to pass a class, not to learn. There is so much emphasis on passing classes and getting good grades, which is obviously important, but it's so much focus on grades that actual learning is put on the back burner. Like for example, I recently took the AP bio test and I did fine on the multiple choice because it was all common sense, but when I opened up the free responses I realized I had learned absolutely nothing, but somehow, I'm passing the class.

This isn't even to flex but I'm for the most part a straight A student, so I obviously care about my grades a lot. So much to the point that I'm disappointed when I get an 85. To put that into perspective, if you took a test with 100 questions and you got an 85%, you would have gotten 85 of the questions right. That's 35 more than half of the questions correct. That's really good, but translate it to an 85 on my science test and I'm disappointed? Kind of nuts how from literally first grade until now I've been programmed to think that anything less than a 90 is a bad grade, when in actuality that's a really hard grade to get.

I come to school and the only thing I think about is when I get to go home. I absolutely dread coming here every day because all it does is cause unnecessary stress. I'm supposed to be learning but all I do is memorize information to take a test, and then promptly forget it until I have to stress remember things for finals. It's not a coincidence that my favorite teachers are the ones who actually teach and not just tell us things we need to know for the test, who care about us actually learning the subject and make sure we don't just want to off ourselves the entire time we're here. Learning is great and if we actually came to school to learn, I would enjoy it exponentially more, but unfortunately that's just not the case. Public education- fix yourself