Did you hate school? Well, you’re not alone! Most of us did at some point or another.

Follow up question: Does that not seem strange to you?

Most of us spend over a decade in the education system and graduate year twelve with nothing but a bruised self-image and a very shaky understanding of trigonometry. But we’ve all heard the ‘I don’t know how to do my taxes’ narrative. That’s not what I’m getting at.

The high school education system churns out oily 18-year-olds who don’t know how to manage their money, communicate effectively, or care for themselves on the most basic level. The high school education system does not cater to the needs of the student. The kids that do well in school are the ones who learnt to comply with the demands of the system, which should be serving the students.

Knowledge is freedom, simply put. By year 12, we’ve had a hundred tonnes of mindless nonsense shoved down our throats about the HSC and ATAR. It’s implied that if we do poorly in those last set of exams, we may as well give up on life. All that stands between you and lifelong unemployment is this multiple choice question about mitochondria. It’s ridiculous. And we all know it. But we trap ourselves in the illusion because it’s hard not to believe a lie that’s fed to you five days a week for six years.

The well-known ineffectiveness of the standardised test is only one part of it. To do well in school, you need one skill and one skill only. You need to have a good memory. I didn’t hate exams because I was good at remembering what they told me. That didn’t mean I was any more intelligent than anyone else, but the system would have you believe otherwise.

We all know that the standardised test system doesn’t work for most people’s benefit, so why are schools still following that same structure?

We are not taught the right things, and we are not taught them in the right way.

Capitalism profits off of insecurity. How many people waste thousands of dollars in university just because high school made them think it was the only way to succeed? Of course, we’re put in a system that pits us against each other and teaches us to fear ‘failure’ like nothing else. It doesn’t prepare you for the real world, in any sense. In the real world, you need to know how to communicate and collaborate with coworkers. In the real world, you fail over and over and over before you pass. The high school system sets you up to fail but doesn’t teach you how to deal with it. Those who did well academically probably struggled socially and vice versa.

The system limits the information we are taught, the pace at which we learn and the method in which we learn. It teaches us that failure to comply with authoritative structures and systems means failure in general. It doesn’t. Freedom in education leads to freedom in general. It is the systems’ responsibility to meet the individuals’ needs, not the other way around. I remember hearing a phrase during my trial exams:

“Did you fail school, or did school fail you?”

I went to a catholic high school. There were a few more restrictions on what we were allowed to learn. For example, they weren’t really supposed to teach us about contraception. I’m pretty sure we were supposed to be abstinence educated. Luckily, I had a good teacher who found ways to give us a little more information than I think she was allowed to. That said, I was never taught about same-sex relationships, I was never taught about conflict management, we definitely weren’t given an in-depth understanding of consent. At some stage, I should have had to sit in a class and learn coping mechanisms for anxiety and depression.

You might think, “parents should teach that stuff “…, but not everyone’s parents know those things - they went through the same system. Also, in some cases (such as sexual education), parents assume that schools teach things, and the schools assume that parents teach them. The result is neither. The kids learn from the