hi.
i want to take this time and opportunity in my barely there spare time barely 2 months into senior year to express my utmost dislike, my deep hatred, great loathe, and my largest detest of the the education system here. you know, i might offend some people with this because this piece of writing that i'm about to make can literally end up anywhere. however, this is coming from me and my honest feelings as a senior student, a year twelve, siswi kelas dua belas. at least hear me out.
okay first of all, i wont start with the negatives but its hard if there are barely any good sides to what i'm experiencing right now. i'm sure there were plenty of others who'd complained about this topic in the past; hundreds? or maybe thousands? this isn't something new but i just can't stand it the more i dive head first into this year. it's a universal thing for students to complain about their school and this, i 100% agree with.
probably the only thing i kind of like in the system is that by the time you graduate high school, it'll seem like you know everything in the course stream that you took.
yeah, that's probably it. and even then, we have a keyword: "seem".
why do i say seem? here, in this country (in which they claimed the curriculum was one of their best and it will be able to bring students to a globally competitive standard) listen, honey; we don't get anything. at all. well, maybe little bits that we pick up in the middle of us getting extremely bored or extremely stressed that we lash out, but that's probably it. in example of myself, when getting to a new topic in each passing grade, i will only get as far as understanding the very basic thing before everything blanks out. like nothing makes sense anymore when it comes to tests. i sometime wonder how i got by.
my main concerns for that is that:
1) schools are on and going by 6:30 in the morning (some others can push up to 7:00, but in average, schools start at half past six) and they end at 3:00 in the afternoon. if you count all the hours together, you would get the total of eight hours and a half of schooling. not to mention if one has extra lessons for school subjects, that can last up to four to six hours depending on the student's academics center. altogether, a student can study for about 12-14 hours on a weekly average, five out of seven days a week.
wait no wrong word ksjsjsj i mean 12-14 hours on a daily averagejsjdk
if we take the minimum (say 8 hours) and we add on to that to the time we need to start waking up, the fastest extra lessons that will last around 3 hours, as well as the community study hours that stretch from 7-9pm, a student will be fairly busy focusing on their schooling for around 14 hours a day. it may differ depending on the student, of course, but that is a rough idea of how long a student studies for. usually these hours get extended by the time students reach the end of lower secondary and higher secondary. some students may stay at their academies until 1 or 2 in the morning.
now, now, i know that some countries also have a similar school duration and i'm sure we all dislike the longer-hours system all the same.
2) the immense amount of workload given to students don't balance with the amount of time they have to work on them. some teachers can give a student 2 separate assignments in one sitting; they can be in the form of a 30 question long chain of problems or they can be an entire chapter worth, sometimes even 2, of presentation slides. (true story: i have, not only once, but a few times done math problems that add up to hundreds. we were given around 3 weeks to do them, my hands got really sore and i was just so tired in those few weeks. and the fact that i had to do it in between the many other work i had been given??? extraordinary.)
in one day, we would roughly have 3 or 4 subjects that would last for an hour and a half or three hours. in those subjects we would do endless exercises, listen to long presentations and one time i even did 2 tests in one go. not to mention the amount of homework they would give us. at this, sometimes we don't have the time and students would often resort to cheating their way to finishing their assignments just to get them done and satisfy the teachers... all without understanding a thing.
3) it would be a tolerable stretch if our subjects aren't a lot but sadly, it's not like that. in my school alone science and social studies students will learn 15 subjects (i think social students have one extra one but i'm not too sure since i don't take that). some other schools, like the school one of my friends go to, will have extra subjects such music, scouts, three different branches of a religious related subject that my school only has one of (sometimes even 4). all of which are compulsory at an average of schools.
so to add the insane amount of study subjects one must learn in order to complete their education with the crazy amount of workload as well as the long-hours of studying, it makes complete sense that a lot of just are desperate to find an easy way out.
you can blame a student for not studying in their spare time all the years they've neglected their studies and cram on their last year but what is being a teenager who studies 100% of the time? there are just so many opportunities you can do that might only get limited to that certain time in someone's life, but it's sadly blocked by the pressure and the push to complete school with the highest marks and produce the best graded graduates. sometimes i wonder to myself at night, if they were aiming for the quality of outcomes, why doesn't it feel like it? not to mention the frequently revised curriculums? man, oh to get out of here would be nice.
i understand that there are a lot of countries out there who have a much harder and more complex curriculum than ours, but in that way, they and i (as well as many others here) can also relate to each other. i won't say that our curriculum is the hardest; no. in fact, i'm sure that it's the very standard of a global education system. one or two things can get ahead, but that's only a small portion. it's just we don't have the time which could result to a lack of motivation and leave our problems unsolved. as well as the added the constant pressure of "being the best" burdened to us by teachers, other students, parents and the society.... this is all very exhausting to keep up with. i'm surprised i get any sleep at all actually.
in result to this, i hardly have time to do the things i enjoy; writing, drawing, heading out and going on vacations. and although i must say that with this, whatever system they have going on here have one other good outcome (which is that 95.66% of the society are able to read and write), leisure-wise, we don't really have anything else. you know how they ask you what you're going to do after high school and some people have different answers? well, i find it sad that here, the only question you're going to get in your senior year are "which university are you going to?" like it's the least of the expectation people have on you. it's not that i dont want to get to university (which i do and i've already got my eyes set on some), but it's just sad and it must be very frustrating for the people who don't have any interest in going to continue their studies to be pressured by the same question over and over again.
as an ending note, yes i am an extremely stressed senior year student who's too prideful to admit it to her irl's and instead rambling about it to the internet but i do hope that this doesn't continue on forever, you know?
if you're from anywhere else and you relate in any way, let's cry together TT
(driven my by annoyance and anger, i wrote this whole 1.3k rant in the span of half an hour).
might take this down sooner or later but i just had to find a way to let out some steam, yk?
