Search the Community

Being in school is like being trapped. You can't get out of it, you can't say or do anything to change your current situation. You can only keep going forward until you get that piece of paper that says you know some things. School wouldn't be so bad if you felt like you were getting something out of it. When you have a job, you get paid. Even if your job is absolutely miserable, you have the drive to go on because you know that at the end of it you're gonna get a nice paycheck. But with school, you don't get any of that. You go there for 9 hours a day, and you hear teachers bitch you out and assign seemingly pointless worksheets, tests, and so on. And after the day is done, what do you have to show for you hard work? Nothing. You have a decent grade, that's about it. How much does that grade really matter? Not a whole lot aside from that it makes it seem you know more things than the guy who did just enough to squeeze on by. I find it funny how so many successful and important people were all college dropouts. Albert Einstein flunked out of school and yet today he is regarded as one of, if not the, smartest people to ever live. Bill Gates started a multi billion dollar company out of a garage, and he was a college dropout. The past few days, I have been working on cPanel themes for an up and coming webhosting company. I am getting paid some amount of money for doing these themes. It may not be a whole lot, but it's still something. More than you will ever get by wasting hours and hours a week in school. All the teaching and lessons and so on are all based on the same exact fucking formula - lectures, homework, tests, repeat. The issue is that this formula doesn't work for the vast majority of people. I learn better by actually DOING THINGS, not so much by doing a bunch of worksheets. Also, why is there so much homework? You mean to tell me we go and do this shit for 9 hours a day and that still isn't enough time? On top of that, schools fail to relate anything to the real world. What difference does it make if I know what chlorophyll does? That information will never help me out and will give me nothing in the real world. On top of that, my school in particular fails to offer anything in technology and IT. Technology is the future - and the only thing my school offers in that field is a Tech Center with Graphic Design. That isn't even at my main school, I have to go to another building to do that. If you have a job, you can choose to leave. If you hate your job and want to get a better job, you can leave and go get that better job. In school, you are stuck. You can't recognize that it's useless bullshit and just quit to get a job and build a business - you're stuck. You better do those assignments, and you better get those papers done. Plus, when you have a job, your job has some level of purpose in reality. If your job was pointless, you wouldn't have that job. A company will never hire for a pointless position. Ever. They lose money when they do that. In school, so much of the work exists for the sole reason to give you work to do. Rather than give quality lessons, they just give busy work. So much of the lessons are so disconnected from reality. If you have a job, you're not gonna do pointless shit. You are going to do something that may be boring or not very fun, but you know at the end of it that you will be getting a paycheck out of it. At school, you get through so you can go home and enjoy a few hours of free time before going back and doing it all over again. Even with graphic design classes, they manage to disconnect it from reality. If you are a graphic designer, someone tells you what they want in some level of detail, and you take that and run with it. In a graphic design class, you are given prescriptive bullshit that holds your hand on how to do something. If you already know what to do, you can't just go to the end and see what it's telling you to make - you have to do it EXACTLY as they tell you. It's even worse when they tell you to do a bunch of steps and then immediately tell you to undo all of it. If that isn't bullshit busy work, then I don't know what is. Plus, how does one learn by clicking buttons in a particular order? That doesn't teach you shit. Maybe that's why they do it over and over and over again. What I don't get is why schools can't bother to pay the students something. All they say is "oh, you have to know these things". If you ask them why you need to know these things, they cannot give you a straight response to save their lives. So I ask: why? Why is algebra, biology, chemistry, physics, geometry, geology, and all this other garbage so important? It isn't. If you apply this to Math, you might get told something like "You use math every day!" - and while this is true, what you DON'T use every day is highly advanced formulas. If you're buying groceries, you aren't going to be solving for x in any scenario. Hell, you probably won't do much beyond look at the cost and see if you can afford it. Most people bring extra cash or a debit card to pay for things, they don't calculate the exact prices of everything then walk to the store with $16.72 in order to buy a few specific items. Basic math is important. Advanced math that involves algebra and beyond is going to be useless for the majority of people. With English, you might think, "English is important so people can communicate effectively". On the surface, this again sounds solid. But when you look into it, it falls apart. In English class, you don't learn how to communicate effectively once you get into 8th grade and beyond. You start writing essays, poems, research papers and so on. You're reading a book and answering questions. This entire process actually makes people grow up to hate reading. This causes kids to hate reading and then they become adults who hate reading. They never bother because when they think of reading, they subconsciously expect to have to answer a bunch of irrelevant questions and explain things in detail as opposed to simply reading a book for its knowledge, or its entertainment value. The same can be applied to the graphic design class I mentioned earlier, as well as to any school that has programming classes. You will be taking notes and doing work out of a textbook in these classes. When you work as a designer, or you work as a programmer, you don't take notes and do bookwork. You code and you design according to customer demands. That's it. The people in those classes who might have loved coding may end up growing to hate it and avoid it because all they know is the garbage that happened in a classroom. And the tragedy is that what they experience isn't how it is at all. These schools make people hate subjects that are not only useless, but also the classes and skills that can actually help you make good money and bring in good business, too. The only exception to the rule might be History, as in my opinion History is fairly important. As the saying goes, "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.". You may argue something in a political debate, and even vote for something. But if the majority of people were never taught our country's history, they may very well vote in someone who will make the same mistake that has already happened before. What if you vote in a president that ends up wanting to do a draft for the military? The one time we did one in the past was a total disaster and led to tons of people in the military who didn't want to be there, and thus, a massive chunk were simply not good soldiers. As such, History, boring as it can be, does have a legitimate reason to be taught. What about college? Sure that gets better right? Well, somewhat. In college you will have access to the classes that just don't exist in High School - programming, network security, graphic design, and so much more is finally made available. But don't get too excited - you're still stuck taking those bullshit classes! English, Math, Science, and all those other general classes will be eating up a good portion of your time. Imagine if you want to be a programmer. You can't just go to college and learn programming. You have to flood your schedule with garbage. Instead of just learning these things you want to learn, things that will help you, you will waste a lot of your time on garbage. Want to study your programming course better? Too bad, get back to your report for English class. You never have the chance to focus on the material you want to focus on exclusively - you have to take time away from that to continue to study the same subjects you've had forced down your throat for the past 12 years. On top of that, college is just expensive. Some people go into debt and never pay it off their entire lives. For those that do get it paid off, its still a huge pile of cash that was spent on getting knowledge to hopefully make it where you can earn a massive fortune in comparison to those debts. And as I said before, some of the most important and successful people to ever walk the planet either never got there or dropped out. Teachers, counselors, and so many school officials never acknowledge the idea of starting your own company and making your own job for yourself. It always the same rhetoric: You need to study and do homework so you can get good grades. You need good grades so you can get a scholarship and/or get picked by a good college. You need to go to college so you can get a diploma. You need a diploma so you can a well-paying job. Never anything about alternative ways to learn the same skills without the garbage in the way, never any mention of ignoring college and making your own way in the world and creating a legacy. Nothing of making success for yourself instead of working your ass off to make your wallet have enough to get by and making another CEO's wallet fatter. Sure, not everyone is CEO, businessman or businesswoman material. But the idea of doing such a thing, being able to work your own hours and not needing to spend 2 to 4 years of your life in college, and then going into crippling debt afterward. If you don't have aspirations to build a legacy, or build a company, or make a way for yourself in the world, that's totally cool. But even you get screwed by the total joke of a school system we have. It isn't just those with ambitions or huge visions to change the world, even the regular guy working 9 to 5 is screwed over. The current school system trains factory workers for bygone era. It teaches you to do exactly what you are told, and teaches you to not think for yourself in any form or fashion. It gives you the idea that you can't challenge or question anything, and that you must accept everything exactly as it is. It stilfes creativity and robs people of their identities. Also in the area of time, most jobs are 9 to 5. So why do students get up between 5 and 7 AM? No person should be forced to do such a thing. I don't just dislike being in school. I am not just some 18 year old hating school because it "just sucks". I wouldn't be spending my every waking moment playing games or watching YouTube if I wasn't stuck here at school. I would be working to build a future for myself and to build my own visions, without the 9 hours a day being stolen from me. I don't just hate being in school. It's much, much more than that and runs far deeper than complacent dislike of sitting in a classroom. I can actually give sensible explanations and reasoning and actual thought as to why school is not only miserable, but is entirely ineffective at teaching kids and is miserably flawed in numerous ways. I remember at one point, in my US History class in Junior year, there was something being discussed and the question arose from the teacher "I think we can all agree that School is important, right?". That statement was met with a worrying amount of Yeah's and other words of agreement with this statement. This was part of another discussion but that question and those answers are what stuck with me. Sure, it's totally important. Not because of what you learn (or rather because of what you don't learn), but because too many employers think that a lack of a High School diploma is the mark of a joke of a human. What if a high school kid realized these facts even sooner than I have? What if he decides to drop out and start his own company? Whenever I bring this up to my dad, I always get a response more or less along the lines of "If you can't make it through High School, you can't make it through anything". What if it's not about being a lazy bastard, but rather just about pure efficiency? About not wanting to waste so much time in what, beyond that piece of paper, truly is a waste of time? They say that High School is as easy as it gets, and everything gets harder afterward. Whether or not that's true, I can't say yet. What I can say is that at least after high school, I can atleast get paid for my effort and reap real, tangible benefits to my efforts. They also say that you will miss high school after you graduate. The only thing I can see someone missing is some of the people that you may never talk to again. That I can understand. But if being in school were the best years of your life, that is just plain sad and I feel bad for you. Being stuck in a brick building, listening to teachers drone on and on and on about things you don't care about at all, being unable to leave and unable to escape the prison that school can often feel like. Being forced to do piles of worksheets on even subjects that have no place requiring notes (looking at you programming, and graphic design). If these are the best years of your life, I feel sorry for you and I send my condolences. I may rant more about school in the future, I will probably make sort of update blog a few months after I graduate and get my life settled in a more permanent fashion, and in a fashion that I control. Expect me to continue to rant about other things, both in blog and video fashion as time goes on. I have a lot of things to say, and I am tired of keeping them locked away. And what better way to start than the prison we all suffer from, the forced labor we all are forced to go through because the law says so? Because that's exactly what school is. Forced labor. A prison. It doesn't just feel like one, it truly is one. My advice is this: don't take it too seriously. Do what you need to pass and get out. Don't waste more time than is absolutely required to get done and get out of the hell. Unless you're a doctor or a scientist, in which case you're out of options aside from school - as the college classes that teach both are the only real way to get the knowledge for those areas. But assuming you're neither, spend as much time as you can learning the things you care about, and maybe even starting your own business sooner rather than later if that's your calling. Don't waste it on the meanginless garbage that is school, spend it on what really matters both to you, and to the world.