How necessary is school? This question has swirled around in my mind since it came up in one of my dreams exactly one week and two days ago. Society and, more specifically our parents, tell us from a young age that we must go to school and get an education to be successful later in life. Well, why do we really go to school? What anyone would say when asked that is to get an education so that we can be successful later in life. Most people go to school because they are mandated to by the government and their parents. Their daily lives at school consist of test taking, doing time-consuming homework assignments, taking notes, reading out of books, and answering questions. Well, there are so many resources on the internet that can give us homework answers, book pdf’s, whole slides on a particular subject, test examples to prepare, and some teachers’ entire lessons can be found online. That leads me back to the question of how necessary school really is when we can find anything on the internet. In my opinion, school isn’t as necessary as society makes it seem because it has many glaring flaws when one takes a step back and thinks about it.

Initially, school makes you do 6-7 different subjects even though you will only go on later to get a degree in one of those subjects. For example, what is the point of taking history or art class if a student is aiming to be a doctor or dentist in the future? They are wasting time they could be using to learn about the proper subjects they need. This leads on to my second glaring flaw, which is that school doesn’t adjust the classes we take towards what we need to learn for the job we want. If a student wants to take a course in advertising or entrepreneurship they aren’t going to find those classes at many schools around the country. They’d have to learn that on their own instead of learning it from school. The third flaw is that school puts too much value in letter grades instead of actual learning. Students shouldn’t feel the need to cheat so that they can get a good letter grade to enter a “good” college. Giving out tests and boring assignments are not a good way for schools to test whether a student is learning or not. With the access of the internet basically everywhere, they can look up their answers, write it down, turn it in, get an A, but not understand anything the test was about. So many prominent figures in our society have dropped out of school and become successful or had little formal education but still became successful. For example, according to an article written by “Growly”  Bill Gates is worth over 100 billion dollars, but he dropped out of school to pursue computers and programming. Steve Jobs, the creator of Apple, dropped out and still went on to create the most popular phone brand in the world. Mark Zuckerburg dropped out as well and went on to create Facebook, which is very popular among the older people in society.

Many figures in our history had little formal education but still went on to become successful as well. According to an article by the “Foundation for Economic Education“ Abraham Lincoln spent a small amount of time in a school but still became our 16th president. Benjamin Franklin was a world-renowned scholar and scientist but didn’t have a formal education. Going back to the question, even people like Elon Musk don’t see school as something that should be as necessary as it is made out to be.

Quite frankly, I agree with him. Until the school system fixes its flaws and adjusts to the student, I do not believe school is that much of a necessity unless they are becoming something major like a doctor, engineer, chemist, scientist, lawyer, etc.