Fed up with the education system

I complain a lot about the useless required classes I’m forced to take, and I’m not alone.

I hear many students express the same contempt toward the education system. I heard it through high school, middle school and even in elementary school.
In all this time, nothing has changed.

We still wonder why we’re forced to suffer through classes that have no appeal to us.
One example most IU students can relate to is Finite Mathematics. It’s a kind of torture I would wish only on my worst enemy, and even then I’d feel bad.
This system is unfair, and we need to get rid of it, now.

My mom posted a video on my Facebook timeline. It was the music video, so to speak, of spoken word-artist Suli Breaks’ poem “I Will Not Let an Exam Result Decide My Fate.”

Breaks is known for his lyrics that condemn the standard education system. His poem brings up every thought, every problem, every controversy we’ve expressed toward the system.

Society almost demands we go to college, yet tuition increases every year. We take classes which will supposedly land us a good career, then never use half of the material in our adult lives. We stress ourselves out about exam results as if they determine our future, but the job applications we’re going to school to one day fill out never even ask about them.

In January, the Editorial Board published an editorial about the lack of jobs for college graduates. In that reality, it would make more sense to skip college. But no one looks up to the kid who decided to keep her job at Wal-mart. The boy who went straight to work at the factory will never be as respected as the boy who dug himself into a $50,000-deep hole of debt to find a useless degree waiting at the bottom.

We’ll keep digging because that’s what they tell us to do.
But who is the “they?”

They say we need a college education, they say these classes lead to a good career and they say this would prepare us for adulthood.”

We don’t even know who “they” are, but we listen to their every word. “They” could be our parents, our school counselors, our college professors, our university president, the Board of Trustees or the Department of Education.

I want to know who “they” are. I want to know what their qualifications are to think they can hide out of sight, tell us what to do and say what we need to know for our individual futures.

I want to know why they get to decide that the kid who scored below 1,000 on his SATs will never be successful. I want to know why they can say that the girl who barely escaped calculus with a D is just lazy and doesn’t care enough.

No one can tell us what to care about. And you can’t make yourself care more about a subject you have no interest in. As long as society and the mysterious “they” are going to pressure us to pursue a college education, we shouldn’t have to pay for the classes we aren’t interested in.

Let us learn what we want to learn.

—­lnbanks@indiana.edu
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