Our School System Failed Some Of Us

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By

John Chizoba Vincent

One of the areas our school system failed us is that it never taught us how to manage our finances. Our financial intelligence is one of those things that our glamourous curriculum compilers failed to include in our school syllabus. We were believed to be omniscient in financial matters.

We have so many unemployed graduates out there under the scorching hands of the sun, all of whom are desperately miserable because the school system never taught them how to manage their finances. They were never taught how to make ideas become ventures that could pay them in the near future when properly managed. They were never taught how to monetize their ideas to opportunities or rather how to identify money yielding opportunities.

The school system failed to teach that ideas rule the world and how to manage our talent to prepare us for the future. Notwithstanding, the school system has caused much havoc in the minds of many youths out there; it has in many ways brainwashed them and their craving parents. The greatest wrong of the school system is churning out more employees in the labour market than entrepreneurs.

The school system never taught us the difference between spending money on liabilities and assets. We were not taught that anything that takes money from us are known as liabilities and those that bring money into our pockets are assets. Even if we were taught, it was never practised by these lecturers. How can a lecturer or professor of finance, who taught you financial accounting, accomplish these few things: a few awards, three bedroom bungalow, one in the village and the other in the city, one SRV car and pension? How would students look at him, a successful finance professor or a failed finance professor?

School won’t teach you that reality requires that you do more of those things that bring money into your pocket than those that take money from your pocket. They won’t teach you that. The system has conditioned our minds on how to work for others for the rest of our lives without thinking of one idea that could turn our life around.

Blame the system for making you believe that those teachers or your parents whom you look up to had never failed in one way or the other in their life. And this has many effects in the lives of our young ones now, they are being humiliated by lecturers and their parents because they didn’t meet their grades or rather they carried over in some borrowed courses in school. They humiliate them and make them feel worthless because of one subject or another. Some of the lecturers torment them in the name of giving them marks. Some of them feel humiliated or desperate whenever they fail and are bashed by their parents, lecturers or society. Remember, failure is to be avoided, not feared. Failure is part of life. You can’t escape it.

It may likely be said that many graduates have wasted four to five years of their lives pursuing everybody’s definition of success; blame the school system for that. Some graduates out there are one of the problems of society. They are not problem solvers, but problem givers. Some graduates out there are lost constituting a nuisance in the streets of our country. Blame the school system for their misery because it taught them that school certificates will give them a good life and that dream job once they have good grades.

There are many parents who forced their children to live their own dreams, forcing their children to go to school and study sociology because they once had that dream of studying it but could not because the school system failed them woefully. Some of our parents dreamt of becoming pilots but they could not because the school system gave them law. They believed that what they were taught in school is best for their children to study. In the long run, they end up reaping the fruist of their children’s bitterness. Education never taught us that we are all responsible for our own lives.

It is important to understand that going to school could get you a good, mouthwatering job, but it is more important to also have in mind that the value of education far outweighs just getting a good paying job after graduation. The getting-a-good-job syndrome after school should be something we shouldn’t have at the back of our minds. Most of us went to school for degrees, not for the joy of learning and acquiring knowledge that school gives.

Many went to school to get good grades, many because they needed to please their parents, many going to school because they want to be relevant in the society with their school certificates; and others, because everyone else does. But the truth of the matter is that with the failed school system in our beloved country, you are only left to make a choice of why you want to go to school and what you want to do with your life after school.

The choice is yours and no one else’s. Make a deliberate effort to change the way you see what they taught you in school. See beyond those things you learnt within those four walls.

In conclusion, I can say that the vendors and harm of this failed system of our precious school system depends on how we use it to achieve our goals in life. It is better to use the very best aspects of this system in which we find ourselves while working on improving it to suit us. This way, it will help us pave the way to a happy future full of new perspective and convenience while leaning on the goodies that come with Western Education.

John Chizoba Vincent

John Chizoba Vincent is a cinematographer, filmmaker, music video director, poet and a writer. A graduate of mass communication, he believes in life and the substances that life is made of. He has three books published to his credit which includes Hard Times, Good Mama, Letter from Home. For boys of tomorrow is his first offering to poetry. He lives in Lagos.