Why I Love Learning, But Hate School
I was talking with my mother about school recently, and shared that I didn’t like school. She responded by saying “But you love learning, so how can that be?” I told her that it was simple: I love learning, but I hate school. So, she asked me to write this article for her newsletter to share my views. So here goes.
I believe that all human beings were born to learn. I believe learning is a critically important part of our very nature. If human babies and the young from all living species coming into the world didn’t learn, they would not survive. Learning to me is so much more than passing an exam or getting “As” on a test just to make a school feel proud.
From ever since I can remember, I have always loved learning. Getting new knowledge makes me feel powerful and, well, alive. To gain even a little bit of understanding of, and insight into, the world and its mysteries fills me with the most incredible feelings of connection, energy, purpose, passion—that I am part of something that is bigger than me.
For me, from as far back as kindergarten, school stifles learning. The flow of knowledge is limited, fixed, and suffocating. I can’t even recall the number of times that I’ve heard, “This is way too much information”, “That’s not what I’m looking for”, and “You can’t apply that here”, every time I have tried to think outside of the box or introduced a different way of looking and thinking about the information. School has, over the years, grown to be very tedious, as I have tried to keep up with the many and varied expectations of my different teachers. No matter how involved and eager I feel when starting the school year, I find, as the year progresses, that the “same old, same old” sets back in… recycled perspectives, the same old ways of looking at even new material. I find that I drag myself to my classes, feeling beaten and battered by the all-nighters I pulled to get my assignments done, fretting over whatever work I still have to give in, and, at the same time, acquiring no new learning. This, to me, shuts down critical thinking.
I was raised by my parents to be a critical thinker. Yet, in my opinion, the school system does not encourage, nor help to develop critical-thinking skills in students. Albert Einstein once said that “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination”. Despite coming from one of the greatest thinkers in history, this quote seems to be no more than a fanciful idea to those being educated by the present school system.
To me, learning is supposed to be an adventure, a journey into the unknown in the pursuit of knowledge. Yet, school, the facilitator of learning, is like a walled cage that tries to feed us only tidbits, and what it feels we need to survive the tests and exams, with very little attention being paid to the skills we need to be acquiring to help us navigate the future that is before us. We are propelled through the learning process like homogenous cattle, expected to conform to the system, and to think like a single-cell organism. In order to survive, we students react like livestock to pass the test or exam and score the numerous subjects, learning very little in the process.
For me, the worst part is feeling that no matter which institution you attend, from early childhood to tertiary, it’s all the same. Each institution tries to shape you into their way of thinking and there are divergences in the thinking of each institution.
So, I have resolved to do what I must to ‘survive school’, but will feed my need to educate myself. This is why, as I told my mother, I love learning, but I hate school.
The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Nathan Ebanks Foundation.
