Kindergarden; Pre-school; Elementary school; Middle school; High school; College. They all aim for one goal: getting you ready for what lurks outside the school walls. In other words: preparing you for the real world. Their methods may vary; their training different techniques. Yet, the principle is the same; it has not changed. In short terms: a secular studies program; in a little bit longer terms: about eighteen years of education.
But what is education? Is education playing with a bunch of building blocks that have strange designs on them? Yes it is. That is really where it all begins. However, once playtime is over, it starts to get a little bit more complicated. No longer can you get away with hitting the boy next to you for stealing the toy truck that you grabbed away from the kid across the room.
You start to read and write. Once you have that down, your teacher decides to call you up to read Run Spot Run in front of the entire class! Then, next month, you need to write ten whole sentences on how you spent your Chanukah vacation. How can you be expected to get that done without a heart failure? A couple of years down the line and you have to write some essay on a topic you don’t care about. I don’t know about you, but I have yet to master the art of stretching the words ‘I honestly don’t care about this topic one bit’ to fill up three pages. If any one of you has, I beg of you, please teach me. To top it all off, your principal then comes over to you and informs you that you now have one week to write a five to six minute speech. Has anyone ever heard of the word ‘break’?
Then you get to Math class. What was once 1+1=2 and 1+2=3 has now become 4*5=20 and 9/7=1.28. How do you solve it? You’ve run out of fingers and toes! Then, to make it more fun of course, your teacher decides to stick in some random letters! No wonder you can’t solve the problem, letters and numbers don’t mix. Pie. We all loved pie. I say loved in the past tense because by now every high school student want to throw the home-made pie their mother baked for graduation out the nearest window. Let’s not leave out all those weird symbols. They make perfect sense if you speak Greek or Latin. Guess what? We don’t!
After surviving math class, you walk into the lab for science. I’m telling you these science teachers are all confused. Pluto is a planet. Pluto is not a planet. It is. It isn’t. Every year they come out with new textbooks. No matter what we answer for the question ‘How many planets are there in the solar system?’ we will get it wrong. It’s bad enough we need to learn English, we now have to learn a whole new language for science as well? Carbonaceous film; White dwarf; Ultraviolet radiation; Kohanasey aquifer; Avioli; Gastronomies; Sternoclydomastoyd; Glutomus maximus. The list never ends. They must have some lottery where the next letter picked out is the next one in the name. Most teachers can’t even pronounce them.
Finally, the last class of the day, History and Geography. So many names, dates, places and events. Unless you were an eyewitness, there is no humanly possible way to remember them all correctly. Is it a coincidence that most history teachers are really old? Anyways, your school then decides to host a world fair. Do they not realize that you can barely remember your own family history, let alone American History? Now they want you to remember some culture in the middle of Africa? What is the point? We will never live there.
Then, to your horror, you discover that you must redo it all with your kids. The truth finally sinks in: Education never ends…
Throughout my years of learning, I have been in three different schools besides this one. In each one they pinpointed on a specific subject and focused on it for quite some time. Then I arrived here. In this school they don’t focus on any particular subject, because they understand that a subject is not the full thing. It is only a subcategory of the full object. This school makes it clear form the very beginning that ‘it is a package deal here’. They spend time on every angle that you might possibly need for future reference. I am proud and honored to be a graduate of YNS-Trocki High School for Boys – a school that puts education above everything else.
We might be too old to play with building blocks, yet we are still building every single time we listen to some boring lecture or take an aggravating test. This is what education truly means. Yes the person next to you may look at you in disbelief, wondering how you claim to have made a fortress if there are only three blocks, but that’s not the point. What’s important is that you see what you are building, and prevent it from ever getting knocked over.
No comments:
Post a Comment