What Are We Missing Inside the Classroom? by Nicholas Miata

Everyone in this room intends to succeed as a high school student, yes? As a fellow AP student, I understand and share the pressures being put on you as well as the stress schoolwork can bring. Succeeding in school is difficult. And the education system in place today increases that difficulty by preventing us students from fully understanding concepts that we are being taught and by hindering us from realizing our full intellectual potential.

Why do we go to school? Why are we forced from the comfort of our warm beds and thrown into such an environment as this? Why are we expected to attend this institution for seven hours a day, five days a week? Why is it that we have been indoctrinated to study for tests and quizzes, complete homework, and participate in extracurricular activities?

We attend school to be educated. We thrust ourselves sleepily through our morning routines, out of our houses, and onto our buses to be given valuable lessons that can be used for the rest of our lives. We dedicate 180 days a year to come to school and learn. We, as a student body, enter this institution each day, and are expected to exit as smarter, wiser individuals. We are expected to arrive ready to learn, happy to learn, excited to learn on a repeated basis. That is what school is supposed to be.  

However, today’s schools do not provide us with such an experience. Students do not eagerly anticipate attending school. They don’t enjoy being given countless tests and homework assignments. Students have grown up learning to despise the education system. They all share a universal opinion regarding education: “School sucks.” How can students be expected to successfully attend school for its intended purpose if they slouch into the building with the premeditated mindset that learning is boring and unproductive? How can they receive knowledge if they refuse to hold open the door that allows it to come in?

What has caused students to develop this poor mindset? Perhaps it begins with the methods being used by the teachers instructing them. Every student learns and memorizes in different ways. In fact, there are three unique learning styles. Those who learn visually are able to read body language well and recall information through the use of graphs and charts. Auditory learners retain information that is spoken to them and prefer to be instructed on how to complete tasks. Kinesthetic learners use a hands-on approach and do well working in groups.

Clearly, students prefer to be taught in many different ways. Clearly, no large group of random students can be instructed the same way successfully. This issue is at the core of the problem in today’s education system. Classes are filled with random students, each with individual learning methods and intellectual abilities. And this group is taught by a teacher that uses only one teaching method. Students with that specific style of learning succeed in the class, while those who don’t fall behind. The teacher moves on to the next lesson, continuing to instruct using his or her own methods. The students struggling to keep up fall further and further behind. They participate less and less, and disappear more and more until they show up to class every day in the shadows of the students receiving straight A’s simply because their brains are designed for that specific course.  This form of education simply does not work and must be altered for the benefit of all students.

But how can this problem be solved? How can students be taught in ways that individually assist them while they remain in a classroom environment? As aforementioned, classes are presently arranged and organized randomly. Students are clumsily clustered into a class and expected to assimilate into the classroom’s culture and the teacher’s style. In order to solve this problem, students should be organized into classes based on their learning styles. They should be assigned to teachers who instruct in ways that are appealing to them. This will not only allow every student to grasp material better, but will also make learning more fun and opportunistic.

Attending school can and should be a fun, productive, and enjoyable experience. We, as students, deserve to be instructed in ways that are most beneficial to us, as education has become increasingly important in today’s society to advance after high school and college. Instead of continuing to unconsciously accept a system we have been a part of for most of our lives, we should demand a change in that system, one that will allow the flames of knowledge to burn brighter than ever before.