Walk into almost any high school, and you‘ll see the same thing: students rushing to finish assignments, studying for tests, and stressing about grades. On the surface, it looks like learning is happening. But if you ask a simple question: “Do you remember what you learned last month?” a lot of students would probably hesitate.

That’s because school can start to feel less like learning and more about memorizing just enough to pass. Students spend sleepless nights cramming information the night before a test just to take it and pray for a 90% or higher. The cycle repeats and the material is forgotten soon after. Although some students may struggle with the new units they are introduced to everyday, there is often no time for them to catch up completely.

Additionally, a quiet competition lurks in every school. There‘s always a talk of who set the curve, who’s in the most vigorous classes, who has the highest GPA. Even if no one says it out loud, it can feel like students are all being compared, especially by admissions officers or even parents. It‘s an unwritten rule that students should all be aiming for hundreds of volunteer hours per school year and starting global nonprofits while they’re still in their teens. School for many students starts to feel like a racetrack rather than a pathway to better education.

This pressure adds up fast. Many students feel burnt out long before graduation. Late nights, constant deadlines, and the fear of falling behind can make school feel exhausting instead of exciting. Being awake studying at ungodly hours is not looked twice upon in high school, even though teenagers require 8-10 hours of sleep nightly in order to support mental and physical health, growth, and cognitive function. On top of this, students usually have 8+ hour school days because of part-time jobs, giving or receiving tutoring, volunteering, homework, etc. Shockingly enough, only about 45% of students in the United States complete their bachelor‘s degree within 4 years. A significant part of the reason for this is that students feel burnt out after working tirelessly in high school that their grades begin to falter because they are simply just too tired.

So what’s the point of all this? Good grades can open doors, but they don‘t always show what someone truly understands or how hard they’ve worked. School should be about not being afraid to make mistakes, not students constantly feeling like they‘re not enough or they have to work ten times harder just to keep up. Real learning takes time, mistakes, and curiosity, things that don’t always fit into a timed test or a letter grade. However, nowadays it seems more like one small slip can be reflected as a much bigger mistake in the gradebook. According to the UCSB Office of Teaching and Learning, “By the time the children grow into young adults and attend university, some of them equate ‘mistakes’ with ‘failure’ instead of ‘learning opportunities’.”

Maybe it‘s time to rethink what success in school really means. Instead of asking, “What did you get?” we could start asking, “What did you learn?” Because in the end, the facts we memorize might fade-but the skills we actually understand are the ones we’ll carry with us long after graduation.

<Leyna Joe 학생기자 서니힐스 고교 9학년>