Financial Freedom 101

Today’s education system is flawed. Personally,  I struggled throughout middle school and high school. I was born with a reading disability, and from kindergarten to 12th grade, I felt as if I was looked down upon because of it. Now in college, I am excelling academically and I have yet to even come close to failing a class. My GPA is a full 1.0 higher then it was in high school. Going to college has helped me academically, while also helping me find out who I truly am as a person. I chose to go to a small school where I can focus on academics and not socializing. In today’s society, many kids choose a college where the primary focus on partying and socializing, which makes academics the secondary focus. To me, college is meant for education and growing your mind and not for partying. A majority of society would rather go to a big party school and graduate with tons of debt rather than go to a school that’s fiscally affordable. According to Forbes magazine, student loan debts are currently 1.5 trillion dollars, which is insane! Thankfully I will not be apart of that deficit. The education system is flawed, and many of these people in debt will be working for the bank trying to pay off their loans for a good percentage of there lives.

Why the Educational System is Broken

You have x students with y types of interests and z students with different talents, yet our system throws all these types of students in the same pot and teaches them the same topics. The school system kills creativity and explains everything in black and white. In 2006, Sir Ken Robinson, a British author and international advisor on education, held a moving, must-see TED talk, which has been viewed by millions on how schools kill creativity. Robinson starts his speech by raising awareness of the fact that children who start school now will retire approximately in 2065. Therefore it would be a teacher’s function to educate them on the unpredictability of future events. He states that creativity is as essential as literacy and that all children are talented and are not afraid to be wrong. Mistakes should not be stigmatized but instead, be seen as a part of the learning process. Schools often punish children for making mistakes rather than teaching children that mistakes and failures are okay. Everyone always says that you learn from your mistakes, and while this is true, our tests are designed in such a way that you have to memorize a thick book filled with facts, then regurgitate those facts on a test, and three weeks later receive a grade back. All this grade tells us is how many mistakes we made, or how well we memorized the book, but it does not tell us which mistakes we made and how we could have avoided them. In other words, no learning takes place. The traditional system of education was designed way back in the industrial age. The world is rapidly changing every day, but our school system has been staying the same for hundreds of years. All-day long, students are forced to follow instructions, and if they don’t, they become punished; at school, you’re rewarded with doing precisely what you’re told. This kind of system was set up to train factory workers, which force children to be taught in batches. School teaches children that they are not in control of their lives and force students to get good grades in hope for a good 9-5 job where someone above you manages every second of your life. Many students become bored a demotivated in school because they are continually being forced to do the same repetitive stuff each day. 

No Room for Passions and Interests

Education disregards that we are all unique and different. There is little or no assistance to find passions and interests besides online surveys that schools force students to take in there early high school years. For me, those online surveys were very black and white and broad; they did not help me decide what my passions or goals were going to be in my life. A great deal of talent and potential goes unrecognized in school.

Lecturing

Teachers within schools have an agenda, which is to get through the curriculum. It doesn’t matter if students know the information or if they don’t, teachers rush through a lesson each class and if you don’t understand what you are learning about you are forced to go to extra help and then you might be able to understand whats going on in class. Facing more than 5 hours a day of lectures can be a dehumanizing experience. Lecturing is outdated, with little use made of the incredible resources we have now like the internet and digital media; instead, teachers stand in front of class on a podium and go through boring slide shows in which you’re forced to pay attention to and take every single note for a test you need to pass, or you get punished with failure. 

Conclusion

School teaches students how to work for somebody else. It fails to teach students the importance of personal finance and how to create your own asset. I am a huge proponent of school and about figuring out ways to make it better for a student like my self. I am a student to life and not just school, each and every day I try to feed my brain with information that will help me grow mentally and physically, the education system only teaches people how to memorize stuff and not actually learn the content. The education system is broken and outdated and there need to be many changes to it, to ensure young Americans prosperity when there out on there own.