The pressures of school have caused sophomore Lily Bruce-Ritchie to lose focus on the importance of learning and growing. Instead, she feels she’s been made to look at test scores and grades. Illustration by Audrey Kennedy
Sophomore Lily Bruce-Ritchie addresses the impact her educational career has had on her and the issues she sees with her schooling each day.
Throughout my time in school, the importance of my education has been made very clear to me. Although I still value my education immensely, high school has significantly changed my view of the school system.
When I started high school, my classes started to revolve around how well I performed on assignments and tests, rather than whether I knew the actual material. The respect I received from my teachers began to lessen, and many of my teachers didn’t seem to take my personal needs as seriously compared to my teachers in elementary and middle school.
As a kid, I viewed school as something fun. I enjoyed getting an education. But as I started to grow older, content got progressively harder and my anxiety and stress began to worsen. Becoming motivated to go to school became harder and harder as I started to come to this realization.
Because my grades were the only thing that seemed to matter, I started to care less about how well I actually understood what I was working on and instead turned my attention to finding the easiest way to maintain good grades in all my classes.
The educational system should allow and support students to develop intelligence and character.
But is this really happening when students like myself feel that the focus is only on our scores?
The fact of the matter is that school should be about students growing in many ways. Instead, my peers and I find ourselves in a place where we must behave, appear and work a certain way. Throughout our time in school, we as students will grow.
But, we won’t have as many opportunities to grow in the diverse ways we potentially could because of the various problems within the culture of education.
