Go Out Into the World and be Mediocre!

Right now, most high school almost-graduates are flipping just a little bit of shit. Everyone has to think about the future. Some people have parents who are predisposed to do a lot of that thinking for them. However, it is still up to the almost-graduates to make their own decisions, if they plan to be relatively happy with how their lives turn out. Their parents aren't going to live their futures for them. But I digress...

High school is all about grades. It is all about getting the highest grades possible so that you can prove that you're a smarter, harder worker than everybody else. It's a competition. It is supposed to be about acquiring knowledge and figuring out what interests you and learning self-discipline. Ha. That's a very noble goal. High school is not a noble place. In high school, acquiring knowledge is unnecessary as long as you can remember something long enough to puke it out onto a test; who cares if you've actually benefitted from the class, as long as you pass it? In high school, interests are certainly not cultivated, broad music classes and sports teams aside; if they were, why would my school have so few clubs that the Yearbook Exec had to scramble to find enough to fill a page? And self-discipline? You've got to be kidding me. I'm writing this blog instead of writing an overdue lab report about pee. Self-discipline in high school consists of being able to hold your liquor, not talking back so much that your teacher actually punishes you, and handing in your assignments before the teacher refuses to mark them.

We're supposed to be "acquiring knowledge". LEARNING. But even I can't say that I'm trying very hard to do so. All I want to do is pass the test and get out. Only I also want to learn. I keep saying that I'll learn more tomorrow; I'll learn when I have the time, when I'm not busy doing busy work. I have to make time. I'm lazy, and that needs to change if I plan to live a life worth being proud of. Not everybody seems to care so much about pride of accomplishment, of learning for the sake of bettering yourself. You can't force people to learn. You can stick them in a chair and talk at them and be all big and scary and tell them how their future will be so much more open if they actually try, but you can't make them try. Motivation has to come from them, and if they don't have it, all you can do is struggle and scream and push until they pass the test. High school is all about creating functional members of society. It teaches you to conform; sticks you in a giant machine that makes a really ominous whirring sound and tries to scare you into getting good grades because that means that you get to have a future.

I understand: people do need to be functional members of society. We can't just have a bunch of lazy bums wandering around, leeching off other people and doing nothing to contribute. But it makes me sad that all high school does is encourage mediocrity, even if it is unwittingly. It might tell us to thrive and to think and to be creative and to be innovative. But when your teacher lets slide a deadline because nobody did the work, because everybody was so busy with the bajillion other things they need to do to graduate, it makes me wonder if this system, overloading people who have not yet fully matured with pile of work to do, is actually the best approach. We could get it done if we tried. I truly believe that. We don't need to be on Facebook updating our statuses about how much homework we have instead of actually doing our homework. But we're not getting it done. Personally, I'm not getting it done because I'm not motivated, because my whole life I've have been told that the test is the most important thing, and I'm starting to realize that it's not. Some of people aren't interested in their classes. Some do so much that they have to pick and choose what to care about. And some of us just don't like to be told that we have to do something-which I agree is a poor excuse for not doing something. But whatever the reason, we're not actually passionate about learning, at least in our current setting. We're passionate about passing. We're, however unwittingly, setting ourselves up to be merely functional. We need to figure out a different system; one that gives students the motivation and direction they need in order to actually find something they're passionate about. If they're passionate about it, they will try. Trust me.

I'm so caught up in shallow concern for what I'm supposed to be doing that taking time to do what matters to me feels like blasphemy.

Public education is better than no education. I believe that anybody should have the chance to learn. But that does not mean that everybody is going to take that chance. So many people waste their schooling. They are to blame for doing so. But the schools are letting them. The schools couldn't care less if the students are happy, or working to their full potential, or doing what they love. As long as the students aren't overly disruptive, do well enough to get a B, and end up as decent, tax-paying citizens, the schools brush off their hands and call it a day. Who cares if anything spectacular is created ever again? We just want to survive.

There's a reason Michelangelo and da Vinci existed so long ago. They didn't go to public high school.