Lucy+L’s+OpEd+Article



I don’t want to work at McDonald’s.

I don’t want to work at McDonald’s, so I need to get good grades. I need to do extracurriculars to balance out my academics and to impress the colleges. I need to do better than community colleges and CSUs and maybe even UCs if I can get that far. I need to major in something that will allow me to have a stable and substantial income so I can live in comfort and not be drowning in debt. I need to succeed.

That’s what’s been hard-wired into my brain ever since, well, ever. Maybe in elementary school I was allowed to be left up to my own devices, to dream of being a ballerina-fairy-princess or whatever the heck I wanted to be. I had the whole world at my fingertips. But as I grew older my options started to shrink, and I began to awaken to the reality of being a student. Before I was just a kid, but then I was a GATE kid on honor roll and then I was an honors kid on renaissance and now I’m an AP kid on the track to the dictionary definition of success.

But in the end I still feel like a kid and even though I've been told I’m “on the right track”, I'm clueless as to where this track leads.

The truth of the matter is, the college you go to will not be the be-all and end-all of your capacity to succeed. You can go to community college and be successful, and, likewise, you can go to Harvard and be a total failure. You don't need straight A's, you don't need to be in every club on campus, you don't need to be flawless on paper to be able to succeed in life.You can be a college dropout and become the next Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg, or Steve Jobs. And even though people might tell you the odds are against you, there are still odds, possibilities. Harvard isn't a green card to success. Community college does not doom you to failure. But growing up with the implication of a cutthroat college system where even the slightest amount of slack will kick you off of this "road to success" has made this concept hard to fully realize. And so, I've put my heart and soul into maintaining a flawless academic record, I've fixated myself on this idea of academic perfection, because that's the common stereotype a student should follow. But I've become so fixated on grades that I've failed to consider the bigger picture.

So I guess what I’m bugged about is the education system. I’m bugged by how the emphasis is on the grade, not the learning, the results and not the process – how you’re pushed and pushed through GATE and honors and AP and then there’s the whole standardized testing shenanigans, and then all the sudden college applications and you’re so wrapped up in grades and success that you don’t even know what to do with it once it’s all over. You’re so focused on the now that you forget about the future. I mean, yes, pretty much the only reason you work hard is //for// the future, but the future of the average student usually only entails “college” and nothing else, nothing past getting into college, nothing about what they’re to do once they get out of college. They keep their eye on the prize but they don’t even know what they want to do with it.

I’m a junior in high school, registering for my senior classes, and I don’t even have a clue about anything besides how to get good grades, how to look good on paper. But what am I going to do with these grades? It’s like (for lack of a better analogy) I’ve been stuck on an island, and I’ve built the boat, stocked it with supplies, and am ready to set sail, because that’s what I’ve been told to do – but I’ve neglected to consider my destination. All I know is that I have to leave the island, but I don’t even know where I’m headed. And I feel as though a great majority of students are like this, sailors with no destination. And I'm frustrated with it, because in the grand scheme of things, life //isn't// college, but that's what high school makes it out to be.