Why School Is Useless

Have you ever stopped and thought about how pointless most of the things they teach you in school really are? Perhaps some of the simpler math and social studies could be useful later in life, but the majority of the things we learn are not. School takes up a lot of time, that could be used for something else, it shoves unneeded information down our throats and is out dated constantly.

We are only kids for a fairly small percentage of our lives. From the time we enter preschool until the time an average person graduates you will have spent around 14,000 hours in school. That’s a lot of time. Now think about all the other things you could have been doing during that time. You’ve probably come up with a few things, right? So ask yourself... why do we go to school. We go to school to get good grades. Why do we get good grades? To get into a good college. Why do we want to get into a good college? To get a job we will have to do for the rest of our life... And then we die. Sounds great right? I don’t think so.

I believe that the things that are now taught in schools and are not relevant to the majority of the student population should be taught in college/universities to those that will be needing smarts. This would eliminate much of the time that we would have to spend in school. Even in doing that, there are still a lot of things that are barely relevant to anybody except the teacher. I’m fairly sure that there will never be a time in my life that I will need to know how many times in a rotation a shape would look the same.

After graduating grade twelve most students would be heading off to college or university, learning stuff that might actually come to be of use in their lifetime. So why aren’t we focusing on that? Most jobs will end up training you anyway, even though you just went to school for a total of eighteen or twenty years. You could get rid of a lot of those years in school and just let kids be kids instead of sticking them into a school and having them get information shoved down their throat.

The time we spend in school is taking away from family and friend time. We go to school for eight hours a day and then the teachers expect us to spend time on homework once we finally get home. There are many other activities, a lot of them more important than spending even more time doing classwork, we could be partaking in. There are sports, extracurricular activities and just spending time with the people you love.

I personally love to travel and learn the culture and language of other countries by going there. I think you could learn a lot more that way. You get to be immersed in the language and culture and things catch on faster. But, instead I get to sit in school and learn about places and cultures out of a textbook and from a teacher lecturing.

That leads me to another point. Perhaps they could make school a little bit more interesting to the students. I do not think any fourteen year old wants to sit there and listen to you talk and talk and then have to do an assignment on whatever it is that you were talking about. Teachers should try to make class even a tiny amount more enjoyable and try to engage the students into whatever it is that they are teaching. I personally might find school a bit more bearable, even though it really is mostly useless.

Another thing about school is that a lot of things we learned in school will be useless a couple of years down the road anyways. Nowadays, technology updates so quickly that it seems like a new version of something is coming out every second week. The same is true for most of the things we’re learning. They say that for four years of university, when you reach the last year of university, the first two years of information will be out outdated. That’s a lot of information right? This may not apply to math or even language arts, math will always be the same because you can’t change math, math is math. But in science especially, people are coming up with new innovations everyday and science is changing in small ways along with those innovations. Teach us the consistent basics and then let us choose what we would like to do from there.

We only get one shot on living this life, so why not make it fun and enjoyable, instead of sitting in school and working until we die. We should spend our time with family and friends, and doing fun things that we will remember forever. I hope that my essay might just have persuaded you into agreeing with me.