High School: The Ultimate Paradox

I'm not sure where to start, really. I mean high school is full of them. God. I mean the fact that no one wants to work but they want that carrot, that reward at the end.
To tell you the truth, it's just all makes you a closed-minded, cynical, lump of uncreativeness. The true paradox? Your supposed to learn in school, right?
Well I think we learn from school. I think that school teaches how I do NOT want to live my life. So stressed about how things are to the point where you can't even be yourself.

Let me try to make sense.Ok so we all sit down in math, science, english, and history to gain knowledge or whatever. But were not learning the actual subject per say. We are learning how to learn. How to learn from your mistakes, to learn from others, to learn how to grow. Of course you can drop out, skip a ton of grades, or simply only care about getting that stupid carrot. But that's not the point. The interesting part is that no one counts that as learning. They don't give grades on how well rounded one is. or how one grasp concepts internally. Or even if one just does their work. It's whether or not one does well on some obscure test. This might just sound like private school, hippie bull crap, but tests and grades, they don't matter.

Take a minute to think about a world with out grades. No working for some intangible reward. The goals wouldn't be the grades but the knowledge. It sounds foreign, but great at the same time. And not because one could potentially goof off. BUT because we would just be learning. The teachers would have less stress because they could just focus on their students grasping the concepts completely. The students ideals would be completely altered. BACK TO BASICS!


Or at least how I see it.

Icon

A couple of days ago we read a poem called America. It struck me as not your average poem. Mainly because it was actually good. But i didn't think much of it. Later in the week we wrote a paragraph about it and it struck me like a baseball bat across the face. America. That is the ultimate icon. It is everything we set our goals to. It fuels our hope and aspirations. That may seem like a broad stroke but understand. America is the center of the map. At least as far as Americans are concerned.

I'm not really sure what "pervades our lives" means but I'm assuming it means the icons that affect our lives. The American ideals are my icon. The college-bound, American dream driven, individualist, elitist ideals.

-EDIT-

I've decided instead to do Statue of Liberty as the icon but I'm going to stick with the American Ideals theme.

Quotes

I'm supposed to chose some quotes that reflect me or my ideals. These quotes I think exemplify them, at least a little bit.

"...the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, delirious of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars..." - Jack Kerouac, On The Road


"I'm just a big liar.” -David Sedaris


The two quotes represent the way I feel about two different topics. When I first read the first quote I kind of read it to be the people I want to meet. The ones who are crazy enough to live, and talk and not say a common, boring thing. But I've found that I really just want to be those things. Hoping that I meet that kind of person was only so that I could someday be that way. But doesn't that just defeat the purpose of the quote? It's not to roboticly program yourself that way. I think that's how you truly became great. However you define great. The second one I think just represents the way I see myself. I don't tell people everything. I put up walls. Sometimes I think that is the same as lieing.