*Alarm* BEEP BEEP BEEP. Check the clock, it is 6 a.m. Get up. Eat breakfast. Brush your teeth. Go to school. Get out of school at 3. Go to Practice and or work. Eat dinner. Do hours of homework. Study. Occasionally watch Netflix or Tik Tok (but at the risk of losing sleep). Go to bed around 12:30 to 1 a.m. Repeat. 

       That is a common description of a student’s day due to the education system in America. Students are expected to have academic, athletic, and musical success while maintaining a prominent social life. The standards that students are held to are nearly impossible with having only 24 hours in a day. 

       Do we come to school to learn? I ask myself this question a lot. Am I doing my best to learn and fully comprehend the material or am I doing everything in my power to make sure that by the end of the year I have an A? 

       The education system has lost its title of being a place where creativity, different ideas, and points of view are accepted. School’s purpose may have started with the intent of creating thinkers, but it has evolved, in my opinion, to creating robots. We go to school for hours. We do homework for hours. We study for hours. And for what? So we can get a slip of paper with an A next to our classes.

       School is for memorization, not learning. It teaches us to be workers and not creators. It looks down on the different learning techniques people use and focuses only on how the teacher wants to teach a subject. The school system has become a never-ending cycle that is hurting its students.

       Sleep is essential for mental and physical health. We should all be getting around 8 hours of sleep a night. I can promise you that is not the case. Due to the lack of sleep, students in America have trouble concentrating and being productive. Everyone needs to recharge and have time for themselves. Because of the excessive amount of homework on top of outside-of-school activities, it is an impossible challenge to take on. It comes down to choosing sleep or finishing homework on time. 

       Mental illness is very prevalent in society today. We are constantly exposed to depression, anxiety, etc through social media. Kids go to school early in the morning and get home late in the evening. When they take a break for themselves an “outlet” for them is usually social media. We get on social media and see people suffering and talking about what they are going through and how stressed they are from school. One in five teens from ages 13 to 18 have a diagnosed mental illness. Assignment after assignment after assignment being posted at all hours in the night, because of technology, is a big factor in the stress levels in students here at Marian. 

       Education is important. Education is needed to have a functioning society. How our schooling system is set up today is corrupt to its students. Bright and innocent minds should be nourished and given the chance to develop and think for themselves. They should not be put into categories and punished when they are not the carbon copy of a “perfect student.” School has become detrimental to its students’ mental and physical wellbeing. A change needs to be made, or the cycle will continue for generations.