Of Educational Matters, or the Lack Thereof

Hello, my Raven Rumps!

It’s been a long time, I know, but I’m back! This blog is a little bit off of my usual dark and spooky posts, but I think that this is a very important topic that I need to touch on in my last few weeks as a senior. What is this mysterious topic, you ask? Well, Rumpsies, allow me to elaborate.

What are we actually learning at school? Is it the subjects that are taught to us? How to interact with people? How to tell the good friends from the fakers? Well, the answer, in my opinion, is all of these. This blog is simply my thoughts on this subject, none of this is hard evidence or anything. Simply speculation.

Alright, first things first. I do believe that we learn the subjects that are taught to us, if only in a brief manner. In my opinion, the way high school is set up is so that they teach us how to pass tests, not necessarily teach us the material. We are taught that as long as we pass the test we will get a good grade, so for many of us (Myself included sometimes), we memorize the material rather than learning it and forget is as soon as the test is over. Now, I would bet that at this point you’re asking yourself, “Wait, isn’t memorization and learning the same thing?” The answer is no. Memorizing consists of repeating things back to yourself until you can recite or emulate them in the manner that they were taught. Learning is being able to take the things that you have been taught and apply them to real life situations. For example, one can memorize a piece of music on the piano by listening to it over and over until they can play it perfectly, but the might not know how to read music to play other pieces, because they were never taught how. They were taught to emulate, not to examine. This is the problem in most schools, that we are expected to do a certain thing to get a certain result and the skills are never truly learned.

Okay, enough with that side of the rant. I should probably go over the more social aspect of what we are actually learning in school, such as how to interact with others. School is a controlled setting where we can learn public speaking, social graces, and other important things that we need to know for communication in the real world. We have our groups of friends, which we socialize with and learn how to behave in public, and we have teachers who represent authority figures and guide us in our lives. We also learn how to deal with people who don’t have our best interests in mind, and we learn how to ignore them and handle situations properly when things get out of hand. These are all necessary skills for functioning in the workplace, or in society in general. Social interaction in high school is a good foundation for the rest of your life, and if you learn how to do it right in high school then you’re going to know how to do it right in the real world. Most students don’t understand this, however, and are content to be immature until they graduate; usually when this happens, they’ll hit college and not know what to do with themselves and end up flunking out. If you’re clever enough to pick up on social behavior in high school and learn how to interact with others professionally, you’ll be just fine.

Once again, my opinions are my own, and I don’t expect everyone to share them. Many of you may agree with me, others of you might see this blog as completely ludicrous. I just wanted to share my thoughts on the matter because I am in my last few weeks of high school and felt as though I needed to give one last reflection on what I think I actually learned in high school.

I promise that my next blog will be as ooky-spooky as they usually are, including a rant about being goth in the summer! ‘Til next time, my darling Ravensies~

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