Stages of Education by Jennifer

Stages of Education by Jennifer - April 2015 Scholarship Essay

The first time a child steps foot in their kindergarten class is the beginning of the next thirteen years in which he or she will strive to make the best grades possible to then ascend to the next four years of secondary education. Education is that child’s life, where eight out of their waking sixteen hours are in a classroom, focusing all their attention on whatever subject the teacher in front of them is teaching that day. Education, once accessible to only men, is now universally available to children all over the world. The primary purpose of an education is not only to receive a diploma that will increase their salaries more than those who do not receive a high school diploma, but to achieve a greater understanding of the world which will enable us to function in the adult society.

In elementary school, the point of being in school at that point is not as crucial as it is in high school. The first five years of school is reserved for learning how to function within the school system, not only by learning the traditional curriculum, but also by learning how to interact with others. In elementary school, one learns, along with the traditional school curriculum, many crucial social skills, such as working with other people as a team, learning to respect others and treating others as how one would want to be treated, and learning to solve problems. Learning how to interact with other people helps children prepare for the adult world because in the adult world, a functioning member of society will be forced to cooperate with others in order to achieve a goal, whether or not the group members cooperate favorably with each other personally. By learning these social skills early, students can then apply these skills in the adult world that will help them become a type of person who is cooperative, respectable, and accepting of others.

Junior high school is those three years that most students would like to forget. In the middle of emotional, mental, and physical development, students are attempting to find a grasp on themselves. At this point of their education, students are being separated into different classes, where “gifted” students are separated into little groups where they can learn to develop their heightened skills and “average” students are separated to be taught the standard education, with busy work that will keep their grades high enough to be placed in honors classes in high school. Before high school, these three years are for students to really find the motivation to perform well in school based on how advanced their classes are, which can apply to the adult world. In advanced placement psychology, it is taught that the more one is exposed to a method of thinking, the more likely that one will adopt those thoughts. Therefore, it can be inferred that one who has been exposed to a higher level of expectations will carry on these expectations through high school, college, and onto the working world where they will push themselves to be the very best that they can be. By being aware of the expectations that will be placed upon them as adolescents and adults, junior high students can then begin to preparing themselves for the hard work coming in the future.

The four years of high school are the most crucial for adolescents. From freshman to senior year, high school students subject themselves to grueling amounts of work in order to impress colleges so that they can have a chance of receiving a secondary education. From technical classes to advanced placement classes, high school students not only learn how to apply the pythagorean theorem to Newton’s Laws of Gravity, but they also learn from their high school teachers important values of life that they will then carry on for the rest of their lives. High school is important because it is these four years between childhood and adulthood that they learn the most important lessons of life before leaving home and into college and into the adult world.

College is supposed to be the time of one’s life. However, these four years are the most important four years of a young adult’s life. During the next four years, college students must study the hardest that they ever had in order to receive the degree that will propel them into the working world, working in the field that they spent hundreds and thousands of money on so that they could be financially stable for the rest of their lives. College is the transition between being a part of the conformative education system and being thrown into the chaos that is the adult world. During these four years living independently from parents, students learn that being an independent adult is more than cooking for oneself and cleaning up the bedroom; it is paying taxes, making sure to complete tasks that if not completed will compromise their chances of success, and learning to improvise one’s own life that was never taught in elementary, middle, and high school. College is the pinnacle in which children truly become adults: these are the four years that will truly prepare students for the adult world, and that is the purpose of an education.