"Man is the rational animal,"spoke Aristolte, a figure whose achievements are the embodiment of human potential. We are akin to other animals in many ways yet separated by a vast chasm of higher thought. An essential part of our mental development is education. Thus, it is unfortunate that our education system, once the pinnacle of our virtuous elevation, has been degraded to an animal-like undertaking. Modern education is a Darwinian system of competition. Bound by artificial selection and limited by resources, the benefits of learning have been replaced by a struggle for academic survival. Amidst the soils of our upbringing, competition not only hinders our growth - it is in fact the root of our ignorance. The American education system, a machine of which I am a product, needs to minimize competition and refocus on individual learning.
There are several apparent effects of academic contest on the individual student. From an early age, the desire to get good grades inhibited our individuality. Wanting high marks in school, we were afraid to incorporate our own ideas, instead rearranging the class material into the typical essay or multiple choice formats. If there was cultivation of unique thought, it happened in spite of school, not because of it. Standardized tests had an especially heavy weight in the competition for college. Some students, who may have wanted and deserved to attend excellent universities, missed out because they were not familiar with some arbitrary information deemed important by society. There was no room for questioning during our adolescent stampede towards higher education, leading to our generation's atypical lack of rebellion. Faced with the difficulty and necessity of getting into college, we responded to any problems with that motto of the Orwellian horse Boxer: "I will work harder."
But most detrimental to the student was the system of academic approval, the measuring stick of educative competition. School can be very superficial, judging us on our appearance of intelligence - grades and test scores - rather than any intrinsic understanding. That we are only evaluated in terms of our achievements has several harmful repercussions. Besides inflating all of our egos, a system that valued the ends allowed us to sacrifice the means, allowing us to do whatever it took to get good grades. This mentality continues to have harmful consequences at the University. Why show up to lecture if the class is weighed solely by the exam? It is no surprise that cheating runs rampant. Those who have cheated successfully in the past continue to cheat. All tasks, from community service to extra-curriculars, cannot easily be determined as genuine acts or mere r
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