Why?

We wake up. We go to school.We sit for unhealthy periods of time. We're taught various subjects and fields of learning that may or may not interest us. We go home. We stress and slave over homework. We go to sleep. In the morning we wake up and do it all over again. Why?

Students have fallen into a rut of constantly going through the motions of what society expects of them. Schools have transformed from a breading ground of creativity and innovation into large scale factories producing what is to be "the future of America" or "the next generation of workers". How are we any different from an assembly line of cars? Every day we go into a rigorously structured schedule and are shaped and programmed in a way to fulfill the roles that society demands of us. There's minimal room for pursuing actual interests and making true progress. I find myself spending most of my time writing for a college level language class; I'm not going to be an author. I'm doing countless physics problems; I'm not going to be a physicist. I'm reading over tedious and complicated statistics problems in a college level math class; I'm not going to be a statistician.

I look around me and I see my peers in constant anxiety over that next assignment they need to turn in, the big test they have next period, or the huge project due tomorrow that they haven't had time to start. I begin to ask myself again, why? We do all these things and stress ourselves to, and sometimes past, our limits to take classes we don't like, in subjects we know we won't use, to impress colleges that we don't even want to go to. I wonder how we so easily get caught up in the rush to have that great SAT score or get a 5 on that AP exam. We seem to lose sight of doing things that we enjoy and being productive in a direction that will actually make us happy.

I could sit here all day trying to figure out all this madness, but I've got other assignments I need to do. Even though I question the meaning of this huge rush, I still find myself caught right in the middle of it. And while I disagree with the purpose and direction that I'm being pushed in, I still can't afford to get left behind. Why?