Education is a big deal now. In fact it has been since Plato founded the Academy in Athens. The basic concept was to teach the young knowledge and skills considered necessary in society. Everyone needs some knowledge about the world and skills to survive. Our entire world is based on the importance of education. The number of educated people decides a country’s economy. It indirectly decides for example, how many types of phones we have in the market, how much they cost and how many people can afford them. Countries are ranked according to the educational status of the people. It’s an extremely complex web but surely, education is important because the well being of anything and everything depends on it. Thinking about it, I realised that the true meaning of education got lost when the concept of formal education was implemented.

My life goes like this: Wake up, go to school, come back, study, eat, and go to sleep. Wake up, go to school, come back........Similarly, my entire life is pre -determined. I will graduate from school, enter into a college and graduate from college to get a job. I’ll have to work till the point I need a cane stick to walk and can’t remember what eight times eight is. Then I will wait for the inevitable- death along with the respiratory disease I picked up living in the city. Somewhere along the way I will be expected to get married and have children. All our lives are structured in a similar pattern. Basically we’re on an assembly line in a factory producing overworked citizens.
Every day I wake up in the morning with a fear gripping me. I don’t exactly know what it is that I’m afraid of.

Perhaps it’s the English test on Monday, or finals in March, or getting into a decent college, a decent job, there are multiple possibilities but I have realised that all I am studying for are marks for these marks, I expect, will get me a decent job.  And all this pressure surrounds because everyone else is worried about the same thing as well. So, even if I decide “I have to study for my personal growth, because learning new things is fun and that it’s not all about school and exams”, the entire world is there to pull me back. After a test on people will ask “so, what did you get?” but you’re trying to let go of that obsession with grades; however when you see that all your peers are talking about grades, grades must be important. People are constantly telling me to stop worrying excessively about grades and there are other people constantly asking me what grades I got. Even if I do want to stop worrying about grades, how am I supposed to when they will decide the next 60 years of my life?

So, are we on an assembly line because our lives have been written even before they started.