“Success” renders education meaningless

With classroom capacities bursting at the seams and exponentially increasing pressure of college admissions, it seems that the definitions of education and success have been altered into the exact opposite of their original roots.

In the past couple of years, I have noticed that several of my friends have started taking classes just for the GPA boost or for the fact that they “look good” on college applications. Many have taken up an extra curricular or joined a club that they usually wouldn’t glance at otherwise.

It is now somewhat of a norm to take challenging courses, or else a hidden stigma underlies when saying, “I’m taking a regular subject, no honors, no APs.” When you step back and realize what this generation’s students are putting themselves through, honestly, the quest to be “successful” looks like the dementor of our childhood.

The reality is, school has become way too focused on molding its students into perfect models in order to get into college. Stress levels have gone up for both students and teachers because they have to cram more information in their lessons as state standards start rising. College entrance tests such as the SAT, ACT, and many more, attempt to quantify students’ full abilities just by the amount of bubbles filled correctly on a scantron; thus narrowing down the acceptance rate for colleges, and cutting futures off for thousands of well-deserving students.

This leads to a depressing loss in the love of learning. Countless students are taught to memorize words from a book all day, rather than how to present those words with a coherent understanding to their peers. Social skills are lost, competition increases, but most alarmingly, the simple liveliness of kid disintegrates. Students are left with no choice but to stick their heads in a book, and not have time to look up and witness the life passing by around them.

We are losing the opportunity to explore subjects we love, and are forced into classes we hate, all to try to shape ourselves in the cookie cutter mold that colleges desire. But is taking that extra AP class going to help you get that extra two hours of sleep you know your body needs? Is that added extra curricular something you really enjoy, or what the admissions officer wants? Are you really enjoying what you are learning, or just whizzing through homework and studying, letting it go in one ear and out the other?

In the grand scheme of things, what is all the all-night studying, truck-loads of homework, and olympic-sized college criteria really for? What is its summation, and is it really worth the trouble we face everyday?

Students need to realize that it’s okay not to take an advanced class and instead, enroll in one you truly are interested in. It’s okay to do something because you truly love it and want to go into the field you’re interested in. It’s okay to go to community college, heck it’s cheaper than a UC, has smaller class sizes where subjects are grasped easily, and has a two year UC transfer program!

We must get rid of this stigma which is slowly asphyxiating our childhood, robbing our sleep, and shifting too much stress on our shoulders. We need to understand how to love learning again, and remember that the meaning of success does not lie in how many points you can accumulate, or the prestige of the school stamped on your diploma, but what you actually do with the knowledge you attain.

In ten years, no one will really care what college you went to, whether your high school GPA was a 3.4 or a 4.3, or how well you did on your SAT. People care about the kind of person you are, and how you treat him or her and the ones around you. Most importantly, the beauty of life revolves around the same factor that people care about: how you have implemented the knowledge and experience you’ve gained in life to create a thriving future for both yourself, and the rest of the world awaiting before you.