It’s been awhile since any of us have walked down a kindergarten hallway. Yet, across the country and the span of time, and as long as coloring and finger painting have been staples in the golden years of our lives, so has finishing the daunting sentence, “When I grow up, I want to be…”
Back then, the common answers were president, astronaut, cowboy or maybe even a cowboy astronaut. The bottom line is almost all of us had high aspirations — we set the bar high for our future selves. Yet somewhere down the line the end of that sentence has changed, sometimes to less ambitious goals. Along with learning to read and tying our own shoes, we are also taught that being the next president of the U.S. or a doctor who will cure a disease is out of our reach.
One of the most famous TED Talks of all time, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” by Sir Ken Robinson, has the overall argument that we are “educated out of creativity.” More than that, it may not be education pushing us to fit one mold of what an educated person is. There is such a thing as “wrong” math, and it is feasibly impossible to teach every student to develop ideas the same way no matter how hard a teacher or professor tries. Our overall lack of imagination is not affected by the way we are taught as we grow up, but what we are told about our performance in learning. Education isn’t killing our creativity: It is the tests we take that kill our aspirations.
The difference between kindergarteners and anyone older is no one tells 6-year-olds they are flat-out wrong. But by junior high school, we have tests and exams to let us know how much we don’t actually know. The bad test grades come fluttering in earlier for some, but the biggest wake-up call for many of us comes when we enter college. Everyone wants to be a doctor until the exam scores for a chemistry exam get released. There are many Hemingways and Rowlings among us until they receive feedback on their writing.
I am a freshman, so I can only speak personally of one round of midterms and half a semester of exams. However, this isn’t a backlash for my struggles in my exams; I haven’t been doing half bad. I’m writing this because I thought the nonsense studying was going to end once I graduated high school. With grades heavily fortified on exams as the “be-all and end-all” of my college existence, I find myself studying for points and not concepts. I couldn’t care less about whether I know what I’m doing. What matters most is if I’m bubbling in the correct educated guess. Worst of all, I had to cut down on activities I can actually gain something from, such as reading classics and working on Rosetta Stone to learn Spanish, so I can memorize gradient vectors in order to not fail my classes.
The good thing is many industries now look elsewhere when it comes to their top concerns when hiring potential employees. According to an article published by The Atlantic in August 2014, The Chronicle of Higher Education conducted a survey with employees asking them to complete a 100-point system questioning what they looked at most when hiring college graduates. Overall, GPA averaged only 8 points while internships and employment during college averaged 23 and 21 points, respectively.
So, the mentalities of industries have changed while those of colleges have not. Students are forced to spend immense amounts of time stressing and preparing for exams that businesses relatively don’t care much about. Colleges need to catch up with today’s times when exam scores shouldn’t be what lead students to a successful path, because exams can point us in the wrong direction. Instead of cramming hours upon hours for stress-inducing exams, we could be using that time doing something else, like actually learning something that pushes us to become better than we are today. Perhaps we might come closer to reaching those dreams we’ve had since kindergarten.
Joshua Udvardy is a UF engineering freshman. His column appears on Wednesdays.
