I don’t think school is really about learning anymore.
Somewhere along the way, it stopped being about curiosity, discovery, or actually understanding anything. Now it’s just about grades. Numbers. GPAs. Letter scores. You could spend hours trying to truly understand a concept, trying to connect the dots in a way that makes sense to you—and still fail the test because you didn’t memorize the exact formula or phrase the answer the “right” way.
And if you ask questions, if you try to learn in a different way or need more time to grasp something, you’re seen as lazy or behind. It’s like, unless you can perform perfectly on command, you don’t matter in the system. You’re just another low score. Another data point dragging down the curve.
And the worst part? It’s destroying peoples mentally. Students walk around with permanent anxiety, burnout, like it’s just a normal part of life. We’re expected to juggle assignments, deadlines, extracurriculars, and personal responsibilities like machines, not humans. Everyone’s overwhelmed, but no one wants to talk about it because breaking down feels like weakness. So we keep going. We suffer in silence. We smile when we’re crumbling. All to keep up an image for a system that doesn’t care if we’re okay, as long as we turn in the work.
We’re told to focus on the future college, jobs, careers but how are we supposed to build a future when we’re being trained to fear mistakes instead of learn from them? When our worth is decided by a percentage on a paper instead of the effort we put in or the progress we’ve made?
It’s exhausting. It’s disheartening. It makes so many smart, capable people feel like they’re not good enough just because they don’t fit into the tiny, rigid mold that school forces on everyone.
School should be a place where people get excited about learning, where questions are encouraged, where effort actually means something. But right now? It just feels like a machine that grinds people down, spits out a grade, and moves on no matter what it does to our minds in the process.