Learning for a Future, Not for a Grade by Zoheb

Learning for a Future, Not for a Grade by Zoheb - November 2013 Scholarship Essay

“When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling” (John Taylor Gatto). The American schooling system currently involves the legal assertion against adolescents to learn certain subjects in school. Many students go through their whole high school simply partaking in this ongoing, dull machine, which in the long run, usually leads to the realization that the four most significant years of their lives have been wasted satisfying only what was required of them. Many students’ day to day lessons simply involve memorizing meaningless information in order to pass their courses only to never again perform the same tasks in their entire lifetime. During my high school career, the most important lesson I learned was not about the causes of the Civil War or how to perform an acid-base titration. The most important lesson I learned in high school was to attain some sort of enlightenment off of each and every class that I took and to keep that insight or knowledge for my future studies and aspirations.
When I was about three years old, my parents moved from India to the United States in order to afford me and my brother with a better education. While they were growing up in India, all they did in school was memorize countless pieces of information and write essays on everything they knew about. My dad especially despised the school system and felt that the whole system was ridiculous and founded on unreasonable traditions. He wanted his sons to have an education which would teach from a more secular perspective, unlike the traditional schools of India, so we flew to the United States and began the rough transition into a new society. I grew up working hard in my primary school mostly because of the assiduous principles my father had been raised on.
Several years later, during my freshman year of high school, I was used to simply passing through the motions of studying and taking tests. It was a simple memorize-and-regurgitate process which I conducted beautifully in order to attain a high ranking. However, in the middle of my sophomore year, it hit me that I had no clue what career majors I was interested, and I did not have the slightest clue about what subjects I truly loved. I had only been memorizing in order to do well on tests; I had not actually been acquiring useful information. Similarly, all of my friends had the very same problem. Every day when I woke up, I would ask myself if what I was doing was truly preparing me for my future. Of course one could argue that my grade point average spoke for itself and that I was easily ready to take on the next phase of my life after high school, but I was not satisfied at focusing my high school years on a grade point average. It was at that very moment that I realized that something had to change, and that is where I truly learned my lesson. I began to go into depth into each and every one of my classes, especially the ones which spoke out to me. I started out junior year believing that my passion was in math and that I would major in actuarial science to pursue a career in actuarial science, but the more I studied math, the more I realized that a job focused solely on numbers is just too dull for me. I shifted into focusing my attention onto my chemistry class, and I realized how exciting the course really became once I decided to go past the curriculum and even conduct my own experiments. I emailed some professors at my nearby universities to gain more insight, and now I am quite positive with what I want to do with my life. If I had not learned how to escape the trivial learning patterns which many students my age experience on a daily basis, I would have never reached this enlightenment.
Although the American school system does provide for hundreds of thousands of kids, I believe that it hinders a student’s true creative thinking pattern, worsening education. Because of the American school system, the most significant lesson I learned in high school was to study in school for the learning experience and the knowledge, not for the grade.