The "Real World"

Here's my issue. I know school is important and I need to graduate and get a degree because how can I get a job without a degree and then how can I have a lifelong career that pays for my kids college and what not? 

(Run on sentences are my favorite) 

I know all of that. And I value the education that I'm getting. It's important and not everyone has the same opportunities as I do. I consider myself lucky to have the options that I do. 

However, I am a firm believer in school not being for everyone. I'll use myself as an example. I get good grades, I study, I'd say I'm a decent student. But I hate the structure of a classroom setting. It makes me anxious and paranoid and, frankly, very bored. You could be a straight A, 4.3 GPA, all around awesome student and school not be for you. 

It's not giving up. It's realizing that this isn't something you should be doing. There's a stigma in the United States, where if you don't go to college you're a failure and you were just a bad student in high school. Well, I'm here to tell you that I graduated from high school with a 3.4 GPA and I hate college. I absolutely hate it. 

I hate the structure, I hate the professors treating their students like children, I hate the dorms, I hate that students HAVE to have a major (I'll explain later), and I hate that a student can't take classes outside of their major without permission from faculty. 

There's more, but I figure you probably don't care about my excuses. 

I know getting an education is important, and I'm glad it is. But I wish it wasn't NECESSARY. There are students everywhere (i.e. Me) who struggle with sitting in a classroom all day and struggle with the construction of school. 

I find school tedious and boring, to be quite honest. It's not for everyone and I wish the "real world" would accept that. Just because someone didn't go to college doesn't mean they aren't smart or willing to learn for a job. A degree shouldn't equal worth, but, for some reason, it does. 

Let's say you're a student who doesn't mind school, but just don't want to waste time in a classroom when you could be doing something else. These are the best years of my life. Between the ages of 18 and 30, I could be doing so many things of value. 

I could be traveling to 3rd world countries and volunteering, I could be visiting places like Greece and Turkey and studying the culture, I could be attending music festivals with people from all around the world and learning their languages, I could be doing anything (assuming money isn't an issue) but instead, I'm in school. 

There are some things you just can't learn in a classroom and, if you ask me, there are a lot of things in the classroom I don't NEED to learn. 

Real world experience comes from experiencing the real world, right? 

I'm an English major at Towson University. Yet, according to Towson, I am required to take a math class, two science classes, a seminar that we do not get to pick, a foreign language, economics, and the list goes on and on. Yeah, these classes could be interesting and they're important to know. But I don't really see how spending 5 semesters getting my Gen. Eds finished is a good use of my time. Instead of being in writing classes and learning about literature around the world, I'm in a biology lab doing something that has nothing to do with what I am interested in. 

Maybe this is me just being ignorant, but so be it. I'm entitled to my opinion. 

I don't know why majors are a requirement either. People say college isn't job training, that it's there for us to get experience. So why do schools force us to pick the field in which we'd like to go and learn nothing else? What if I'm an English major and I want to take an acting class? I can't because it's not part of my major. 

Why can't I just take classes that interest me and learn as much as I can in the four years that have been allotted for me to do so?

I could be eating cheese and drinking wine in France, but instead I'm struggling to pass a history course. I could be seeing Les Miserables at the West End in London, but instead I'm state side eating dining hall food that makes me sick. 

Why is it social norm that we go to college during this time in our lives? Why isn't it acceptable for me to take a couple of years off after high school to explore the world and experience as much as I can? Because the way I see it, I won't have time after college. I spend four years of my life in classrooms, taking tests, and learning from a textbook only to be thrown out into the "real world" with a degree and no career (unless I'm very very lucky). If I do get a job - a good job - after graduation, I won't have the time or energy to experience all that I'd like to. That doesn't seem fair. 

All I want to do is go cliff diving in South America and go back to Nova Scotia and take pictures of everything I see. I won't get that opportunity after I graduate. So why was I also not allowed that opportunity before I went to college?

I said it before, I'm grateful for the options that I have because there are some places where school for little kids isn't even an option. 

But seeing as I have all of these opportunities, why did society say it wasn't acceptable for me to take advantage of them?