Education is Failing Everyone

As we are just over halfway done with the 2024-25 school year, I can’t help but notice how many of my peers are burnt out and disillusioned by our broken education system. The focus of contemporary education is often on acquiring the highest grade point average instead of cultivating genuine creativity and passion. Because the aim of getting a good grade does not instill creativity, curiosity and drive, the singular focus of a grade-driven system cannot prepare students for the modern world.

The modern landscape of our approach to education — with the exception of a minor subculture shift to discussion-based classrooms — has barely changed beyond the rising price tags associated with the collegiate experience. The U.S. experienced massive problems rising from the increased testing and heavier burden placed on teachers to be passing their students, due to the No Child Left Behind Act enacted in 2001. The Every Student Succeeds Act was passed in 2015 in an attempt to counteract some of these issues, but it by no means compensates for the deep-rooted issues throughout the educational system.

I, myself, have experienced this failure. In my junior year of high school, despite maintaining a 4.0 GPA, I had failed to learn or challenge myself seriously. That was, until I encountered AP calculus. It broke me and my GPA that year, but I had never felt more proud of a grade in my life. Despite suffering greatly throughout the year, at the end of the course I realized that no class had ever endeavored to challenge me to learn like this one had. In removing the ideals of a perfect grade and GPA, I was able to experience an education beyond the pursuit of a good grade.

The U.S.’s education system fails to acknowledge how little a grade can reflect learning. When contrasted with some of the best education systems in the world — Denmark and Finland — the U.S. lacks many of their key practices, according to articles published on the official website of Denmark and the World Economic Forum, both prioritize problem solving capacity over memorization, lowered or eliminated standardized testing, don’t make schools have a competitive atmosphere, respect and train their teachers to a higher degree and emphasize students specializing in areas of interest in high school. Due to the earlier specialization, many universities in Europe do not require core requirements once entering university.

In the U.S., college students with far less direction are far more frequent despite the immense cost as compared to Europe. According to an article published in the NACADA journal, a publication put out by The Global Community for Academic Advising, “full-time college students in the U.S. who selected undecided as their intended college major increased from 1.7 percent in 1966 to 8.9 percent in 2015” and “as many as 75% of college students will change their major at least once.”

As a public university, MSU falls into many of these common pitfalls seen throughout American education. No matter what degree or department you may have, we are all confined to the same grade-driven system. Often the burden of fighting this system falls upon individual professors. I have found that my favorite professors often stray from traditional practices like testing because they recognize how little learning test scores reflect.

The creativity our future world will need has been stripped from us after years of ceaseless, monotonous curriculum aimed at inflating our GPAs. And in its absence, those of us who now seek to enter the adult world are woefully underprepared to make an impact.

So how do we fight this? We ask as many questions as we possibly can and we imbue this passion into our education systems. Everyone has a skill that has the capacity to change the world as long as we do not squander it on a mindless pursuit of financial gain. How we educate ourselves and others has the capacity to cripple or amplify the potential of a nation. For the sake of all our futures, please question the system that defines us and pursue your curiosity beyond the currently limiting collegiate establishment.