Best of Today: School

Every time I walk into Mr. Allen's Humanities class, there's no way that I can walk out of that class without learning something new. One day we would be talking about vertical listening and apply it to songs that we would listen to, and the next we would discuss about what kind of graph does life follows. Today, however, I learned an interesting fact about the history of educational institutions (a.k.a. school).

As a class we were discussing on how Socrates discusses about philosophy to the public rather than lecturing it. And then Mr. Allen goes on by asking the question of why do teachers lecture students during school. Eventually, Mr. Allen tells us the whole story of why schools were established in the first place: The reason why school starts at a certain time, why we have scheduled classes, why we have bells in the beginning and end of every class, why we have lunch breaks is all because of the fact that back then, Western society wanted to train us to be well qualified factory workers. I was utterly shocked when I heard about it and then it clearly all made sense to me. Mr. Allen went on by saying that society didn't want us children to be working in such harsh conditions in factories, so were else were they supposed to put them other than school where they can train them to become great factory workers.

Now I'm glad that schools don't function that way anymore. Yes we still have to start/end at a particular time, have scheduled classes, hear the bell ring at 5 minute intervals and the like, but we have so much more freedom including in the school year. Freshman year may not have been as laid-back, but senior year definitely is more relaxed by choosing your own courses that you want to participate in. Also, with have this freedom of choice, one is allowed to explore different fields of creativity. And from then on, you are able to choose WHATEVER career you want to partake in and become whatever person you want to become in YOUR future.