America’s educational system is devastatingly tragic, and we need to fix it.

No question is dreaded more by homeschoolers than the infamous “Where do you go to school?” – Not because we don’t know how to answer; but because we know how the answer will be received. Without hesitation our curious peers quickly assume us to have a plethora of quirks that make a homeschooler a – well, homeschooler. Any confidence the asker had seen in us quickly shrivels into shyness, awkwardness, and worst of all – naiveness. From the moment “home” leaves our lips we’ve already been thrown into a stereotype junkyard, with our true uniqueness hidden under a pile of ignorant rubbish. Growing up as a homeschooler felt like an uphill battle in many different ways. Constantly feeling the need to prove ourselves to those who couldn’t see our individual ability past our educational situation. From an early age – we have this innate ability to know what being different feels like. In our younger years, we’re always wondering what it must be like to get on that big yellow bus the neighbor kids huddle into every weekday morning. What is it like to sit in a classroom? What is it like to have conventional teachers? What was I missing out on?

When I turned 16 a program was created that allowed top-performing high-school students to take a compass test similar to the SAT/ACT and place them into full-time college paid for by the high-school. Because I was technically in a school district and my parents paid taxes to the school within this district – the high-school was required to include me in the program if I scored high enough on the placement test. After I placed into college-level reading, writing, and mathematics – I was enrolled full-time in the program as the first homeschooler. The questions I had asked myself when I was younger were getting answered; I was finally getting a real glimpse of what standard education was like in our country.

I had enrolled as a business major with a planned minor in psychology. I wanted to utilize higher education to jumpstart some of the businesses I started in middle school and scale them profitably. As much as I hated the idea of being seen as naïve, I had the most starry-eyed idea that college would give me all the answers I needed to grow a thriving business. Scarily, this is how I thought of higher education at the time; and I couldn’t have been ignorant.

I remember my first classroom experience vividly. Walking into my accounting class – palms sweaty, wondering what will happen and when. The professor kindly greeted me and it wasn’t long before we had our first lesson. My first class-based test rolled around the following week – extremely nervous and filled with anxiety I ended up barely scraping by. I didn’t understand because I had read the textbook thoroughly and bought several books on the topic we were studying that week. I had also built a spreadsheet utilizing the methods explained in the textbook and created a mock-balance sheet based on the material we were taught. Taking the test was alien to me – it was all multiple choice questions and most of it was vocabulary. I couldn’t believe how irrelevant the information in the test was compared to the logical and applicable material that was learned from other sources. I had spent so much time trying to figure out how to apply the information to my business – I couldn’t answer the regurgitated vocabulary answers on the test. This became a huge problem for me. I had never learned this way before and had to force myself to adapt.

As months went on the dreamy idea of higher education faded and I eventually learned how to correctly take standardized tests. Most of the answers were just copy and pasted from textbook examples and slapped into the testing. I made sure to highlight key vocabulary, dates, and people. The more I practiced this skill the higher my grades rose. Instead of independently learning the information and utilizing it in an applicable way I was mastering the art of being a college student – regurgitating information and giving black/white answers to colorful problems. I hated it. Though, it was nice to be recognized on the Dean’s List and getting into the National Honors Society felt special at the time.

However, I began to realize that I hated school. Not because I didn’t want to learn, but because I *did* want to learn. My schooling was getting in the way of my education. I wasn’t critically thinking anymore, I was becoming a standardized robot. After a long internal battle with myself – I decided to drop out. I made my family upset, my friends upset … my professors were upset. Everybody told me I wouldn’t amount to anything because if I didn’t have that glorious piece of paper at graduation, I would be sweeping floors or flipping burgers for the rest of my life.

From that moment on I poured everything I had into my business. I bought books, got involved in online communities, watched relevant YouTube videos, practiced what I learned – rinse and repeat. I woke up in the morning, learned as much as I could fill the day with, then went to bed late at night. My business eventually failed. I repeated the process, and that business failed too. I was hired by a software development business when I turned 19 – that failed too. Despite how many times I tried but didn’t succeed, I never felt like a failure. I was so glad to be back on the track of growth that I just kept trying – because every failure gave me a bundle of real-world experience that our current educational system never could. I never gave up because even though everything I had tried failed, the potential to succeed seemed to linger closer each time.

Today I’m 22 years old and a self-made millionaire – the choice to drop out of school was the single greatest decision I have ever made in my life.

I realize now that I had it backwards when I was younger. I wasn’t missing out on the bus, they were missing out on learning. While they were going to school, I was learning to code and create programs on my computer. While I was creating, they were learning how to become excellent test-takers. I find it odd how information has never been more accessible in the history of our world, yet standardized teaching has never been more widely used. We all have the ability to independently learn anything we want – yet we push for old-school classroom teaching that hasn’t changed since the 1800s. We’re taught that we need to go through a government-regulated system to properly learn something; this is a very sad reality.

In the political world, we’re pushing to make this outdated system *free* - what good is free education if it’s foundationally broken? What policies do these candidates plan to implement for reform and change within higher education?

I was extremely fortunate to grow up in an environment that cultivated independent learning and free thinking from a very early age. If I had not grown up in a similar fashion, the contrast I saw between learning styles when I went to college would have been much harder to differentiate – and I may not have fled the standardized learning system despite surface-level dissatisfaction with it. Had I not fled the standardized learning system, I would still be trapped in a government-regulated, anxiety-inducing, stress incubating, decaying environment that millions of American’s are currently pushed into today. I would have never had the time to fail enough to succeed. I would have missed out on my true education for regulation and legislation.

America’s educational system is devastatingly tragic, and we need to fix it.

Submitted February 17, 2020 at 10:08PM by Perspicacity_ https://ift.tt/2HwDJGr