Pathetic and sad how we're not taught anything worth anything in school. Doesnt matter how long you're "educated" or what institution you're "educated" in, you're put through the system either way. I know that real education is a privilege not an obligation or a birth right, but how much of this "education" isn't about force-feeding information down children's throats? The last time I checked, education was about realizing and respecting each individual's potential through exposure to knowledge, not hard-jamming of personally irrelevant but socially-perceived "important" information into people's brains. It's an open secret that the "education" that we are put through is just a 12 year guide book invisibly named "How to survive the system 101 (for dummies)". Don't get me wrong, I am thankful for my academic knowledge (or else I wouldn't even be able to type this) but this is just my opinion on the rigid system with a euphemistic name. Instead of learning relevant skills, emotions, scenarios or ideas, we are forced to memorize information in chunks and then responsible for regurgitating them on paper. A walk through any school before an examination would be greeted with desperate cries of "Oh shit I can't remember anything" "I'm just going to wing it" "I'm going to fail" or the likes(many of which are accompanied by a chain of expletives). We're "taught" to "remember this, (even though it might be completely irrelevant to your life) this is important because it's going to be tested" and after the major exam we find out that we haven't learnt anything worth anything at all. This "education" we speak of is nothing but a process of moving from a cage to another cage, where we seemingly "promote" and should we fail to memorize and engage in word vomit adequately, we're subjected to the dreaded fate of "retaining" where you stay in the previous cage and watch every other bird fly to the next cage as you live with the label of "retainee" (or the other fancy names that some institutions have given it in the most pathetic attempt to make them feel better about themselves). This "education" has created these labels along with separating institutions according to academic merit (ITE, polytechnics, JCs) that have magically become the benchmarks for intelligence and intellect. Filtering. That's what they call this process. Just a fancy name to differentiate the bad apples from the good. Since when did academic success/being book smart (aka being able to memorize and take a good long figurative crap on paper) determine good apples? Also, I get really puzzled when I hear the terms "neighborhood school" or ITE or polytechnic being used as a derogatory stereotype to describe a collective that is not the socially-accepted
"book-smart". I know tons of people who are from these "neighborhood schools" or ITE or polytechnics that know so much more about what really matters in this world than just contents in lecture notes and I think they deserve so much more respect than they're getting right now. I was not from a "neighborhood school" but I'm not book smart at all, and I'm hardly achieving much academic success, and the little voice in my head goes "or maybe that's because I'm stupid" (see what I mean?). I also get very frustrated when I hear people say "Arts students have no future" because it simply isn't true. This is precisely what I mean when I say that "education" has created this false ideal of a "future" that has made every one of us products of society who are servants to this ideal. What if I don't want a big house or a stable job? What if I'm happy dropping out of school at 13 and being a painter on the street? Who, besides the individual himself, really has the right to decide or judge what/how the individual learns and in what kind of institution? This is an endless argument but this is just a random rant so I'm just going to conclude with the thought that what schools don't teach you is how to be street-smart, how to survive the "real world" fraught with intricacies or fundamental human emotions or values such as empathy. I feel that the "education" system should focus more on realizing the deep-seated passions of each individual learner by equipping them with the material they need, and create a generation which is not only truly happy but healthy too, instead of just creating carbon copies of uninterested and overworked students with too much on their plates who are trained to recite each word of every dog-eared lecture book.
