Common App Essay

“If the school sends out children with a desire for knowledge and some idea of how to acquire and use it, it will have done its work.” Unfortunately, Richard Livingston’s quote is about a flawless, perfect education system. Intelligence is measured by quantity; grades and standardized tests are the two examples that demonstrate this. Schools encourage learning and developing broader mind, but how pragmatic is that? Students, even the brightest ones, tend to simply memorize facts to do well in school and then forget everything they learned. (Until the midterms and finals, of course). With the pressure of getting good grades, it is difficult to appreciate the whole ideals of what school is really about.
Why am I concerned about school so much? It is because, under the education system that I learn by and probably by many other systems in America, it strains the students’ learning and passions, even with elective courses that they can take. There are so many people with their own talents that aren’t related to the core curriculum, and so can’t develop them properly into a way that they can use it to do something they love professionally. Not everybody will be good at the four main subjects; math, science, social studies, and English, though I do believe every student should be required to take them. Grades subvert what true education is about. With the importance of standardized tests of SAT and ACT, how is that colleges and universities can see how well you will fit into their schools by looking at simply how well you did on two or three subjects? Even with colleges requiring essays to see more than the quantitative data, your numbers truly make or break you in getting into colleges.
Grades do not necessarily reflect on how well you did in school. An example from my life is getting C’s in Algebra II in my sophomore year; even though I didn’t do so well in that class, I learned the fundamentals and have helped me do even better in Pre-Calculus and now Calculus. Contrastingly, getting A’s in my AP English class in my junior year do not represent how much I learned, as I didn’t feel any smarter after that year. A perverse problem is cheating, becoming more and more acceptable. However, the underlying problem with cheating is not because students are apathetic to learning, but because the learning that is taught in schools is to memorize and do well on tests to get good grades. I am fortunate enough to be taking a class called Great Books. In this class, the teaching methods are different; there are no homework, quizzes, and tests, and the teacher and students get to decide on when due dates. Also in the class, students are very interactive with each other and the teacher as we discuss many different topics that would seem strange and unrelated to outsiders but very familiar and interconnected to the ones in the class. These different elements have helped each student in gaining intellectual knowledge that has really opened up our eyes to how the world is actually functioning while also learning each other’s opinions that are pragmatic to our lives.
My national concern for the educational system is that it is flawed in the way what school is suppose to be to what it actually is. Students for the most part, are taught to memorize idly for a temporary amount of time and then they forget it because none of the materials that are tested on are useful to everyday life. If school could teach lessons that are bigger than just facts and ideas for a certain subject and focus more on how society and the world operate, Livingston’s quote could come true in the way that schools will send out students with a desire for further learning with passion and also with practical use.