Should lives really be determined by our education system?

I have once heard someone say that school is like a prison. You get trapped for 8 hours a day, eat bad food and are forced to listen to uninteresting rabble delivered in monotonous drone. Take a moment and reflect on this. Perhaps now you realise how flawed our education system is.

I see education as a form of ‘natural selection’ in our society. In the natural world, those who are powerful thrive while those who are weaker are eliminated. In the latest iteration of social Darwinism, “power equivocates with knowledge,” with “qualifications form the basis of strength and power”. People with higher qualifications gain respect and access to opportunities that are simply unavailable to those without. This is predicated on the belief that those with the most qualifications are the most able in society. While this may be true for some cases, the generalization of this notion has reached such an extent that otherwise qualified people are denied opportunities, costing both them as well as society.

While some may argue that those who are able would naturally seek to acquire qualifications, I disagree that this is absolute. Some may simply lack the monetary ability to attend universities, whilst some are simply not ‘smart enough’ in the strict way that society wants us to be. Steve Jobs is a name that we are all familiar with; behind his tremendous success, a story lies beyond. To start with, it is important to note that Steve DID NOT enjoy school (just like you and me). He was that one ‘strange kid’ who liked innovating technology, he was never ‘smart’ enough to achieve top literature grades nor had the ability to become a doctor, or a lawyer. At the age of 18, despite being able to enter a college, he stormed out of his lecture one day and dropped out of college after the first semester. After hanging around campus for 18 months, feeling hollow and useless, he decided to work on what he was most enthusiastic about. However, his journey of self discovery was like a roller coaster. Without high qualifications, he knew he would not be able to get a high paid job. In other words, he has placed a bet to continue working on his dreams. Eventually, he worked to become a successful man with his legacy still living on (on our hands). It is fair to say that although Steve could not achieve top grades nor high levels of qualification, he lived to become a legend who has changed humanity for good.

On the other hand, some students who come from wealthy backgrounds never work hard. They party day and night, and live an extravagant life for their age; even their college allocations were bought by their parents with huge sums. In 2019, a scandal arose over a criminal conspiracy to influence undergraduate admissions decisions at several TOP American universities. This reflects the corrupted nature of our society and how affluent parents often abuse their monetary power in order to ‘purchase’ education degrees. In these cases, is the notion that those who are worthy will always get their qualifications as absolute as perhaps once thought?'

Our education system revolves solely around numbers: our grades. These motionless numbers determine every single bit of our value and worth as an individual. They determine everything, from your personal image, to your status, to your life. Education is skewed to favour the ‘smart’ and the rich. People who are ‘smart’ in that one very specific way dictated by the views of society; this ‘intelligence’ refers to only academic grades, with social skills, surviving skills, one’s morality, critical thinking skills, interpersonal skills, all not taken into account (not even a single bit). And if you haven’t scored a 42 in IB, sorry, you are simply not ‘smart’ enough to take med. “But don’t worry!”, they say, “there are always jobs which pay the minimum and require the longest working hours!”. Furthermore, our education system is ‘rigged’ by people with wealthy backgrounds. Not only can they illegally purchase college admissions (as mentioned above), but their social networkings, college donations, money spent on tutors to improve their son’s or daughter’s grades, all put the less opulent in disadvantage and partiality.

I often find our society extremely bizarre, just because I do not get A**s, doesn’t mean I am mentally inferior and less deserving than people who get better grades than me! For all that I know, they may not even know how to order in a restaurant without their mums helping them. I am not saying that the education system is utterly trash and has no use whatsoever. It does act as a way for students to generate knowledge and to build social relations. However, the fundamentally competitive nature of our society often labels people as ‘worthy’ or ‘not worthy’ based on their grades, and our current education system just encourages this idea.

I believe your biggest question would be: but what can we do about it? Unfortunately, any attempt to completely overthrow our education system and transform stereotypes would be impotent and impractical. However, I think that the most important thing for us to do, as the next generation of our community, is to reflect on the flaws of our education system and our society when it comes to educational stereotypes; and to remind ourselves that grades do not determine a person's worth. The values we behold, perceptions we develop, and above all, our sensitivity towards others’ feelings, emotions, attitudes, beliefs all contribute towards enhancing self evaluation and wisdom.