Everyday we complain about school, we see it as some burden that we have to do just to get it over with. We complain that the teachers are bad, or there is too much work or that we have to take a test and in all honesty these things do suck. The thing is that even though we do have to wake up early to go somewhere we don’t like, we would still be lost without it. What would we do everyday, we would wake up and watch TV and eat. We wouldn’t really know anyone because most of the people we know through school in one-way or another. We may go to school for 13 years (if you go to college) and it may only lead into a job and more responsibilities, but that sounds like its total fun right? Our only time in life of almost no responsibilities and worries, we spend in school. I mean the later we start the later we get started being individuals with out own responsibilities. Everything we do in school all leads up to the point where we apply for a job. Hopefully this job will make us happy and pay the bills, and maybe along the way if you found the time you met someone who you like or love and then marry and reproduce with, THAT it the American way of life. That is the life we are all supposed to be living. By going to school and doing what they tell us, we will achieve that life and be happy. School doesn’t teach us how to be happy. It teaches us how to learn something else that will help us get a job that will make happy. The Declaration of Independence states:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
School is a governing body, it governs the students up until a certain age and they enter another governing body. School is there to uphold our values of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It promotes the pursuit of happiness, but it doesn’t secure it. It makes you believe different things will make you happy, then what you originally had in mind. School doesn’t make you into sheep, but it doesn’t make you into an individual either. What is the reasoning behind taking away our individuality?
It is a mix of hope and fear. The powers at be think that by putting us into groups that determine who we are and what we know and what our intelligence is, then we will be a safer but more successful society. If we all have the same strengths and weaknesses then we will all be the same. The lower intelligence groups can end up in the lower positions which involve grunt work and manuel labor. The middle groups end up in cubicles filing and selling to the other middle class people. The upper middle class can end up managing the middle class and govern them. The higher classes are the ones who run the businesses and they are the ones who control it all. They have the money and therefore they have the power. Not much has changed from the days of the Kings and Queens, only now the lower class at least have opportunities to become part of the higher class and have their voices herd. We all want power and money and to be happy, but how many people think of a job in an office doing something like telemarketing and thinking back and saying “you know what, this is what I always wanted to do.” They spent 9 to 13 years of their learning things that would never really help them when they became this telemarketer that they always dreamed about being. But here they are, they spent that much time in an institution that they hated to they could be happy now. Is it a fair trade, Freedom and youth for responsibilities and money? There was a movie called Big starring Tom Hanks. He played a kid who wished he was an adult and suddenly he was one. It was scary and overwhelming, but he was happy because he got to design toys for a company. He made money and got to buy all the cool stuff he could ever want. He even got his best friend in on the ride. Soon he became romantically involved with a woman who saw his potential and wanted to use him to boost her own career. Things started to become overwhelming though. He was afraid of the responsibility and we went back to the fortune teller machine and wished to become young again.
He bypassed his whole childhood and he wasn’t really ready to be an adult. He wasn’t ready for the responsibility and the competition to be successful. He wanted to have fun like any child would, but that just isn’t the same when you are an adult.
That is the whole point of school. It is there to get you ready to be an adult. Whatever you do or don’t do with your adult life is for you to decide. School is there to mature you by putting you with other people who are just like you and making you realize that you need to either sink or swim. They give you the choice, whatever you decide is what makes you happy and successful or not. We are all given Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness from going to school, its how we decide to take it and what we do with it that really decides it. We are given the ability to pursue our happiness, it is up to us how we go about actually achieving it.
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