Education until Eighteen

Today, young people are expected to stay in education until they are eighteen. Eighteen years of developing your knowledge on the subjects taught. Eighteen years of working hard to get better grades. Eighteen years of your life dedicated to building up a CV that will eventually determine how you live the rest of your life.

Some of you will decide that eighteen years has been enough and you will leave the security of the education system for the unknown and an unaccustomed workplace. The rest will choose the path to higher education, with the price of not only another three years of your life, but a fee of £9,000 a year.

But what are you actually learning in your school years? You are practising the mundane activities that your government has told you is the ‘required education,' but does this stay the same every year? Of course not. Our government will change its mind on what is the necessity to learn and the age that is appropriate to stop learning under these conditions. And they will do so without as much as our consent. Our future is in the lives of these grown-ups that have decided, by seemingly some divine right, that they know better than we do about how we learn. Although perhaps the majority of them didn’t have to go through university to find their jobs.

It seems as though every year the exam system changes. No modular exams, the younger years have to start picking out their GCSE options sooner. French is now compulsory to get into university…oh wait; no it isn’t.

We put our certain futures in the hands of adults that couldn’t be less confident in their decisions. Is it not enough to leave education after seventeen years? Is it a tragedy to start finding work after sixteen years? Well here’s a certain answer. If there is work that you can do, that you enjoy more importantly, then you should be able to take that opportunity.

It is true that not all teenagers are fit for the education system – some just can’t work well in that kind of environment, what about them? What about you? You’re told that you have to stay in education whereas school might be the bane of your life. So why is everyone forced into staying when to leave is all some can think about.  Do you honestly think that all of today’s Leaders worked well in a classroom? You don’t necessarily need to be in school to be learning, or to be teaching.

I think that if you want to stay in school for that amount of time, then that’s a personal choice and one that everyone should have the right to make, it isn’t something that should be taken lightly and certainly shouldn’t be a decision made by someone who hasn’t been in the position themselves.