I just spent 20 minutes typing out a massive response explaining how utterly terrible my experience was with school. But I realized no one cares about my life story and there is no way I can fully capture my experience in this discussion post. But in short, the structure and expected rigor involved with school often made me want to just quit and eat lead. It was by far the worst time in my life and I went to a very good college prep school.
The teachers and most of academia only car about the straight laced kids who do well naturally or because their parents are good about offering structure, or the kids who clearly have a troubled home life. But since I didn't have either of those things, I was a "problem" kid and no one gave a shit about how I was doing. I wasn't being beaten at home so I didn't have an excuse for my poor performance.
I was constantly exhausted because I was naturally a night owl and school requires kids to get up way too early. The way lectures and studying were structured never jived with me and I was so tired most times I'd stare at a wall all class, I could never get into the groove of things.
Yet even after all of this, I've been very successful in my career even though I never went to college, nearly all of my coworkers have masters or phd's. I taught myself everything I know when it comes to practical application of skills in my field, literally none of it was taught to me by anyone, and a lot of it I taught myself during my highschool years. I take pride in that, but I also hate myself for it. I wish I could of fit into the square peg society nurtures so much, and because of the way I've gone about things, everything I do is harder for me than anyone else around me (except for other people in my situation).
This post does a terrible job really capturing my experience, but it isn't worth my time spending a day writing a post on a forum to capture how much I truly loathe the modern education system for making my life so miserable for close to 20 years. I understand most systems are designed for the 90% case, but being an outlier in today's society is rough and I wish it upon no one.
EDIT: A big reason why I wanted to post, was mainly because most people try to rationalize about how school isn't "efficient" and is an "opportunity cost" etc etc. I have a completely different take on it, school was depressing and extremely emotional for me. It made me very unstable trying to cope with how different I was compared to other people and was very arduous on my soul so to speak and I have lasting impacts on my mental health because of it. It's less about efficiency to me and more about improving the system to help make people's lives better and more tolerable if they're struggling. Suicide is a big problem today and I strongly believe the way our schooling system is setup has a lot to do with that.
The teachers and most of academia only car about the straight laced kids who do well naturally or because their parents are good about offering structure, or the kids who clearly have a troubled home life. But since I didn't have either of those things, I was a "problem" kid and no one gave a shit about how I was doing. I wasn't being beaten at home so I didn't have an excuse for my poor performance.
I was constantly exhausted because I was naturally a night owl and school requires kids to get up way too early. The way lectures and studying were structured never jived with me and I was so tired most times I'd stare at a wall all class, I could never get into the groove of things.
Yet even after all of this, I've been very successful in my career even though I never went to college, nearly all of my coworkers have masters or phd's. I taught myself everything I know when it comes to practical application of skills in my field, literally none of it was taught to me by anyone, and a lot of it I taught myself during my highschool years. I take pride in that, but I also hate myself for it. I wish I could of fit into the square peg society nurtures so much, and because of the way I've gone about things, everything I do is harder for me than anyone else around me (except for other people in my situation).
This post does a terrible job really capturing my experience, but it isn't worth my time spending a day writing a post on a forum to capture how much I truly loathe the modern education system for making my life so miserable for close to 20 years. I understand most systems are designed for the 90% case, but being an outlier in today's society is rough and I wish it upon no one.
EDIT: A big reason why I wanted to post, was mainly because most people try to rationalize about how school isn't "efficient" and is an "opportunity cost" etc etc. I have a completely different take on it, school was depressing and extremely emotional for me. It made me very unstable trying to cope with how different I was compared to other people and was very arduous on my soul so to speak and I have lasting impacts on my mental health because of it. It's less about efficiency to me and more about improving the system to help make people's lives better and more tolerable if they're struggling. Suicide is a big problem today and I strongly believe the way our schooling system is setup has a lot to do with that.