What is school for? A Speech by Leon Oswald..
BERITA LAINNYA - 13 November 2023
Let me ask you all a single question, What have you learned from your time in school? In other words, What is school for? Some would say it is a criterion for success and others would disagree. Society has twisted and changed our perception of success; we would be deemed a failure and a waste to society if we get bad grades, miss a few homework, or drop out of school.
It's those few letters from A to F that determine our future for the rest of our lives. How is that possible? I am Leon Oswald and I am a student of BPK Penabur Harapan Indah; I have lived through all of primary and middle school having to face its hurdles. Right now I am currently finishing my high school years, but I ask myself these very questions every day, what do I want to do in life? Why am I memorizing 24 trigonometry formulas if my passion is nothing related to it?
As long as the word education comes from the Latin root Educe, which means to draw forth or bring out our potential, then the school system we have lived through our entire lives has failed us. It limits the potential for us students who are not “academically gifted”, making us do an
essay, read 150 pages and do three projects at the same time due tomorrow! But what can we do? As having bad grades blocks off our opportunities and even gets us held back a year. Take this, 41% of college students drop out in 4 years or less, this happened in one of the biggest developed countries in the world, specifically the US in the year 2022, outsourced through the website ThinkImpact. Now, when such a developed country like the US has a significant dropout rate,
what would that signify for developing countries like our motherland Indonesia?
The system is more like a stress test (I honestly don't know any other word than this) to test how abused a student can be at work. Classes start at 7 or earlier for us and end at 3, or 5 if you include excul. Most adults start their work at 8 or 9 in the morning, ending at 5. We’re forced to wake up earlier than our parents and to stay in school for longer than our parents spend at work.
How is that possible? I’m sure learning about which civil war came first or what the Pythagorean theorem is will be of use to me in the future… Who am I kidding? We will forget most of what we learn as in the survey CBS Philadelphia did, only 37% of information learned in school is used in the everyday life of an American adult. So if we are not using the information we learned at school, who is at fault? Are the teachers teaching it? Or are the students learning it? Well… let me answer it for you, it is the system’s fault!
This system has limited our creativity and made school a game of Pac-man, where our job is to get all the As and avoid bad scores. How can we change this for the better? I believe that every one of us needs to be vocal and stand up for every one of us is only stronger together in unity!
Together we can propose a better system, a system where grades don’t determine your worth, a
system where every one of us is given a chance and a system where we can show and nurture the talents given to us by God!
Before I continue, let me solidify a fact. Do you know what Elon Musk, Steve Jobs and Bill
Gates all have in common? They are filthy rich and their pockets are loaded deeper than Mariana Trench, but how do you think they achieved their success? No, they did not inherit their success. No, they did not pick it up at school either. Rather, they made many mistakes and overcame each one on their own along the way. They were creative in finding solutions to problems and solving those problems in creative ways.
Steve Jobs saved Apple from near bankruptcy and brought it up to become the largest company in the world. How did he do it? He made the iPod and the iPhone, two revolutionary introductions to the market which changed our lives. Let me ask you this question: Does your home furniture come from IKEA? OK don’t get the wrong idea, he was not a dropout; don’t be a fool. I mean, how could he drop out if the founder of IKEA, Ingvar
Kamprad never even went to school?
I’m just saying that your future is something no test will ever measure. Even if that test begins in 4 letters, UNBK, or 5 letters, IELTS it’s BS if they say those determine your life. No, your destiny is in your hands. You must shape it to be great! So don’t expect school to open doors because it’s more likely to slam them in your face. Everybody watching this, please close your
eyes. Imagine a child sitting in the back of some teacher’s class, he never raises his hand, he fails most of his classes, but inside of him, there is a passion. And if nurtured and brought out will lead him to discover the cure for cancer. I’m afraid that a child’s gifts will never come out. He
will never win the Nobel Prize award, because in class he was ignored and his worth was judged only by his scores. So teachers, principals, parents and students. I ask one more time: What is school for?
Share:
Informasi Terkini seputar sekolah kristen BPK PENABUR
Daftar Indeks Berita Terbaru dari BPK Penabur
