21st Century Education

In moving on with our lives past high school there are a variety of life skills that come in helpful. Being honest and hardworking are in my opinion the most important. If you are someone who is able to tell the truth, and work as hard as you can on anything life throws at you, you will most likely have a succesful and fufilling life that you will be able to look back on with no regrets as well as pride in what you have accomplished. I belive that during our higschool lives, these skills are not being developed as well as they could be. With so much pressure put on how students perform on certain tests and quizzes, some students will resort to cheating in order to make theyre parents and teachers proud. This does not help whatsoever with becoming an honest hard working individual. In fact, it is going in the complete opposite direction. In order to improve the growth of these crucial life skills, high school should be more about improving as a whole and not just cheating in order to attain the grades needed to proceed into post secondary education. Eliminating tests would have no benefit, but if the tests were taken for different reasons other than to just assess what has been learned in the past chapter or unit, they could be more affective. Upon entering highschool, a series of tests should be taken that involve no knowledge of logarithms, or how the human nervous system operates, but instead the tests should be taken to show your level of honesty, integrity and ability to work hard to achieve a goal. Lessons should be tought on how to improve these skills as well as other things that may not be directly related to the essential morals of a person. Throughout ones life in highschool they could constantly be tested on how they are improving not only based on theyre grades in school but also on how they are improving on the inside. To graduate, you must be able to prove your honesty and integrity levels have grown and show the rest of the world that you are not like anyone else, and that you can contribute to the working class society in a unique and special way. As far as I am concerned, I have no regrets about going through the public school system as is. Minor tweaks could be made to improve the system, but overall it isnt as bad as everyone makes it out to be. Next year I will be taking a year off, to work, maybe play junior hockey again and do things that I enjoy. I have a plan of what I want to take in university but it is still subject to change. Physiotherapy, and helping other athletes such as myself rehab from injuries is something I have always wanted to do, but there are so many other things in life, such as technology, that are growing not only in terms of how complicated they are, but also in terms of how crucial they are becoming in everyday life. Sometimes I get the feeling that if one does not recieve any type of formal education on using the worlds latest technologies, we will eventually fall behind and become useless within our community. With so many changes in todays world, my thoughts on what I want to do with my life are changing almost as often as Apple releases a new Ipod. I can only hope that when my mind is completely made up, my choice will not be one that haunts me as I move forward past school.