Education plays a vital role in the lives of everyone, no matter what age group they fall in. From the tiniest toddler who is beginning to speak for the first time, to the ninety year-old man who receives a small seed of knowledge from the sharing of a life story, everyone can learn. It is what we choose to learn with our time that separates the intelligent from the apathetic students in school. There are those who are driven internally to learn as much as they can in order to better themselves as a person, and then there are those who get up and go to school every day simply to please their parents or guardians. Teachers and administrators at the schools try their best to teach while keeping things fun for the students, but one must ask themselves this question" Are schools teaching students the wrong things?

When you think back to High School, what would be the first thing that comes to mind? Probably not what you learned there. More than likely you think of some big party with your friends, or the big game that you barely won your senior year to win the National Championship, or that one girl that everyone lusted over even though she already had three kids and no daddy to help raise them. If schools are there to teach kids, then why are we more likely to recall the score of that big Homecoming game than how to find the derivative of the function x^5+3x^2-12x+2? In case you were curious, the derivative of that function is 5x^4+6x-12, but how many of you who took Calculus at some point in time truly remember how to figure that out? How many of us can still name the capitols of all fifty states? We spent all those years in the classrooms, so why can we not remember all those things we had been taught> What did we really learn in school?

I'll be quite blunt right now and state what it is that we all appear to learn in school: how to socialize. We learn that sports are important enough to get out of classes early, and that the home games are so important that we can cut into class time with assemblies that many people would hate going to if it didn't get them out of going to class. We see jocks pushed to excel in sports because everyone knows that colleges pay big scholarships for anyone who can help their team win. We see those who are intelligent pushed down into seclusion because the jocks are the popular ones, even though the nerds are more likely to be beneficial to our society and develop something we can actually put to us, as opposed to playing some big game that millions of people can watch on their televisions at home. We see more people signing up to try out for the tennis team than people who join a club that does community service.