Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Schooling in Graduation Speech

We need to understand how we categorize students. The fist thing that comes in anybodies mind is ability. But how do you measure ability? Everyone has a particular area of work she/he is good at. Then how will you measure their ability. I may am not be good with spellings, but may be I can write better prose. He may not be able to master the subjects of Mechanical Engineering but my god can he modify a car.

If you put children in different schools based on there ability in different fields, then that would need to field stagnations. Sometimes a short story would inspire a few innovations in neuroscience. We need to have discussions between people from different fields.

Also if you make another standardized test to test pupils abilities would that not have the same result. They would be just as bored, but with better people around them. Who is to ensure that they would not be bored by what they are taught.

Also such a process would lead to elitism, similar to what we have in the current academia. If you are not from your countries best college, then you would have a bloody hard time to get research grants and such.

"Well, you meet people in college!" You'd get a better experience starting a rock band, joining a community service group (or hell, joining the military, it's a similar time commitment and they pay you), all activities essentially free compared to college. If anything, the system of accreditation, the politics of the teacher-student relationship, and the financial concerns of meeting even the most modest tuition rates are nothing but impediments to "expanding ones mind".

Perhaps she has forgotten, or is unaware, that without the schooling she received, without the need to complete those assignments, or prepare for those tests, she would hardly have been so motivated for the future and full of passion because whatever she might say, she knows very well that the education she has received has given her so much and will allow her so many more opportunities.

She does however forget to mention how her visionary education could be? What do we do, not teach kids maths? not teach them the thermodynamic laws which personally I have forgotten but have a vague recollection of them, not teach students of biology, history, geography? Does she suppose that a seven year old, ten, 12, 14, 16, year old can so freely be creative without knowing anything whatever of the facts. Should such student be allowed to imagine what our history was, or how our biology works so that he can be "creative". Does she actually know what to be creative is?

Whatever might be wrong with out educational system, unfortunately some things are basic and simply must be learned. We simply need to teach our kids to read, to do maths, physics, biology, history, art, music, sport, literature. Not simply let them imagine how it could be but yes make them memorise the facts, make them learn the fact. You might forget them the next month, but in the long run you learn the basics of each of these fields. You learn you have a heart and other organs and an immune system and the basic of history, lit, etc.

It is fine to simply shout foul, and for the top in the class that is their past hobby, impatient with themselves, believing themselves to be leaders when they so immature still, but we have been teaching for more than two millennia. You can not simply discredit all this experience with some rhetoric.

As for the creative part, that happens in university. If you did not learn the basics that are taught in primary school, and then on advance, you hardly would be able to independently arrive at this stage of creativity in a meaningful way, that is to gather the facts, learn them, understand them, understand how they relate, synthesise them together, and come up with suggestions as to how things can be improved.

But by all means throw stones as long as your house is not made of glass.