Errors In Education: A look into errors of the US School System

As I start my day at 7 a.m. more than an hour before the world is even awake, I barely have a chance to open my eyes and wake up my mind before I’m bombarded with two math assignments, a review packet and a lab before my morning is even over.

Working into the dead of night with only a few hours to sleep until I have to do the same routine all over again the next day, I find myself asking the same question repeatedly: “If none of this is actually teaching me skills for the future, what is the point?” 

There’s a simple answer: passing. 

Me and my friends barely get to finish our school days with a sigh of relief before the hours of homework and extracurriculars hit us with panic. Every time I describe my day-to-day high school experience to my family who grew up with one homework assignment a night and none of the virtual difficulties high schoolers face now, they’re all taken aback in shock – how am I still standing on two feet when I’m expected to dedicate practically every waking minute I have to school? 

For me, this isn’t a foreign concept in the slightest. Ever since I began high school, it’s all the same – go, go and go. Yet, to others around the world, the American school system is mindblowing and appalling. The constant pushing instilled within students not only results in poor mental health but also creates a poor work ethic that negatively affects grades. 

From the first day of preschool to about eighth-grade graduation, school is as it should be — teaching you real valuable lessons without draining your mental health and energy away. But once you hit high school, however, it’s a completely different story — and it shouldn’t be. 

High school forces you to wake up at the crack of dawn, sit in uncomfortable desks while being lectured for hours on end over trigonometry, conjugations, atoms and elements. Then it’s time for practices, games or any other extracurriculars that drain the small amount of energy you have left. When you wind up at home, you’re left with a pile of untouched Algebra homework, Chemistry labs and English projects that are bound to take hours.

The American high school system is designed for the sole purpose of passing, even if it’s the bare minimum, with the single goal of ending up in college. By the time you graduate, you have no idea how to get a good credit score, how to nail interviews, how to create budgets and save or how to file your taxes — in the end, you leave high school with only one semester of financial literacy and no clue how to succeed in the real world.

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a worldwide test administered to over 50 countries in the world — it tests 15-year-olds to conduct data results that compare school systems across the world. 

According to the program’s 2019 test results, the U.S. isn’t even in the top 10 for reading, mathematics and science scores. Finland’s school system, which scored at least 10 rankings higher than the U.S. in these areas, is based on the foundation of less homework, fewer school hours and students having more insight into their future education paths, resulting in success.

While Finland and several other countries that rank in the top 10 of PISA scores teach their students necessary life skills, especially on how to succeed post high school, they also understand the effect of school on mental health. Not only do they teach a real and necessary curriculum including classes on budgets and taxes, their form of pushing students is vastly different than in the U.S. In Finland, the school days are shorter, starting around 9 a.m. and finishing by 2:45 p.m., allowing students more time to work on homework or extracurricular activities while also maintaining enough time to get a healthy amount of sleep. However, the life of an American student is a stark contrast. With a surplus of hours of work, there’s no room for any child or teenager to simply breathe. 

The American high school system believes that more hours and work will create smarter, hard-working students, but they continue to completely miss their goal. Bombarding kids with loads of homework in hopes of creating a stronger work ethic within teenagers only work to deteriorate students’ mental health. 

In extreme cases, according to the organization Challenge Success, this can result in high depression and suicide rates and a large decrease in grades and participation throughout schools. In their recent census of 43,000 high school students, half of the students said they felt constant “overwhelmingness and stress” from schoolwork and the constant pushing of needing to excel academically. 

The U.S. should stop focusing on what they think is right and take a look at the rest of the world to notice how their system is vastly different and failing in comparison. They need to ask themselves, “What can we do better?” Instead of saying, “What can we do to push them more?” By changing the education system, the possibility of greater happiness and success within children and future generations is at large — and maybe I can finally get eight hours of sleep.