We are all tired. Tired of the never-ending list of assignments, tired of the constant ping of Canvas notifications, reminding us we will never be free of our to-do debt. We are tired of sacrificing sleep and replacing it with caffeine-induced highs and 15-minute power naps. We are tired of dragging the exhausted husks of ourselves down the hallways to class. The husks of our once-curious minds replaced with machines ready to regurgitate whatever we had heard the day before, our past social selves disappeared into nights of YouTube or Netflix, because we simply do not have the energy to see our loved ones. 

Has it always been like this? When do we get to stop for a moment? When do we get to breathe? When do we get to stop wondering, “Will this ever be worth it?”

Our society has long valued, and possibly over-emphasized, the importance of school in a child’s life, and while admittedly access to an adequate education is instrumental in the success of a child, have we overplayed its role? Is asking children all over the country to make sacrifice after sacrifice what we want our education system to look like? Should school really be the purpose of our lives? While it was reasonable, and perhaps even rational, to have our lives revolve around school when we were merely children, our days of swinging from the monkey bars and recess with classmates are far in the rearview. The reality of our day-to-day is stressful classes with expectations we somehow never meet, all under threat of illness from a global pandemic, the increasing intensity of young adulthood and the expectations that come with it, the potential to have to support our families in this failing economy and the threat that our lives will be stolen from us in this “sanctuary of learning” by somehow who has been pushed too far over the line. Is this really what our lives are to look like? 

Even when we graduate, from here or from a form of higher education, is this what a workplace will be like for our future? It would appear as if school is nothing more than an endless cycle of proving you can accomplish tasks, only so you can endlessly accomplish tasks in a workplace, do we ever escape this sensation? 

Admittedly an incredibly loaded question, there is one incredibly simple answer: of course there is more, and we all know there is more. We have all experienced more. Every time we’ve blown off that assignment to see that friend we haven’t seen in weeks, every time we’ve broken our anxiety-sparked study cycle to cook dinner with our parents, every time we’ve done something for absolutely no reason other than the fact we knew it would cause joy. Yet somehow each of these moments feels stolen, as if we were abandoning our “true purpose” for momentary pleasure, because somehow along our way we’ve all been fooled, tricked into thinking that the realest form of joy will come from that teacher’s approval, or that A on a test. We’ve been living our lives as if that is the validation that will finally make us feel whole, but it simply won’t. Only when we live our lives, not the lives allotted to us by a curriculum, will we feel whole. 

This is not to undermine the importance of learning and education, but perhaps one of the greatest detriments to the ideology surrounding school is the notion it is synonymous with education. To be educated is far more than to complete your 12-20 years in an educational institution. To be educated is to be compassionate, understanding, tolerant, and to be intelligent is not shaped in terms of how much we know, but how we react to the ever-adapting world around us, and above all, how to think critically. Some of these skills can – of course – be learned in school. Exposure to the history of other cultures, the past of our country itself, statistics and how easily they are molded, the physics and biology of the world around us and more will all bring us closer to this goal, but it does not craft this bridge in its entirety.

Only experiences, joy, rest and the ability to be social can allow students to achieve their highest potential, both in and out of the classroom. The ability to put school on the back burner, to breathe even for just a moment, is instrumental to our success, and if anything has taught us that, it has been living and learning through the havoc that COVID wreaked on our lives. 

COVID allowed for a place of understanding. CDL admittedly came with its struggles, but with it came a new brand of compassion from teachers; expectations, deadlines and assessments were all as fluid as the ever-changing circumstances we found ourselves in. Our lives have not changed. Many of us are still facing the same repercussions we’ve been battling all along, so why are we expected to force our still square-pegged lives into the round-hole of school?  

Perhaps it is time for school to redefine itself, as so many other aspects of our world have adapted to a newer way of life, embracing the ability to self-prioritize. Schools must follow in their footsteps. The ability to learn without entirely sacrificing one’s own life or health is not the selfish luxury we have all been trained to believe it to be. It is a basic human right, and it is time we treat it as such.