Dear Schools, We Hate to Tell You This, But We Hate You.

When someone asked me about my school life,  I started talking about my friends and all the fun we had as kids. But then I took up a metaphorical looking glass and sat down to really analyse my school life. Now I know I should've asked: " You mean how does it feel like to spend 14 years of my life thinking I was not good enough?" I had always been the average kid. It would be easier for you to see my name on the rank list if you started from the bottom. And I'm pretty sure no teacher is going to remember me ten years hence, because to my school I was that average kid. That kid with the B grade on her papers. As students, we were conditioned to believe that the only way we could better ourselves was to score better, to get a better label. To jump from that C or D to an A and A+. We were stamped like lambs in a slaughter house made to believe that passing exams and with 'flying colours' will always be our finest achievements. What was worse was that teachers felt an immediate affection to kids with horrific personalities if they scored good. As if the marks made their personalities slightly better.Our schools have us buying horizontal books for Math Class when holding up books with vertical lines as they carefully calculate our CGPAs and place us thusly on this ridiculous line.

When you are up on a ladder you have to look down. Toppers: People at the top look down. ( Should I even start with the superiority complexes kids develop at a young age? Spice that up with the other half with inferiority complex and voila, here you have a nice mixture of grown ups with egos and complexes ) Anyway, through out my whole school life, I grew up believing that I'm not enough and that I'll never be. I was an average little girl who aspired to be someone great. But how could I when I was supposedly far down the rungs?How could I when I was made to believe that my progress report was everything? That it was the only accurate measure to who I really was.

This is not just a rant, I have to say. Every grown up out there will say this. Why do we love our schools but yet when we say love we are only associating it with friends and fun and not education? This fascistic regime have our basic instincts honed  in a way that it hates studying.

Why is it that we know the names and capitals of various countries and yet we have a hard time pointing them out on the globe? Why is it that most of our lessons are words and sentences and paragraphs put together. Why do our systems ask us to keep updated with chapters and theories that are way outdated. Why don't we study anything worthwhile? Why do we forget them the minute after the exam? Because we were studying for the exam and not for life. Isn't that sad? This is to our screwed up educational system trying to make everyone alike. Be like Mary. Be like Raj. We are robbed of our opportunities to be ourselves. This is going to be just another article amidst a million others on the same topic. I doubt if this system will ever change. But we can make things better for ourselves.

Dear Parents and Teachers, let's stop putting ridiculous amounts of pressure on our kids. Make them understand that they are beyond labels. All it takes for you is to tilt that vertical line. Now you see they are all the same. Printed report cards are senseless means to measure kids about whom you can write  books.