It has been long since questions disappeared in classrooms. As children grow and learn more about the world, their curiosity is triggered. When they reach the age of six or seven, they start questioning like “Why is the sky blue?” and look everything with sparkling eyes full of curiosity. These children who are born with instinct curiosity begin to lose it as they enter elementary school upper grades and middle and high school. Although not always, even university tends to be the extension of classes without curiosity and questions. There are a number of factors that contributed to a lack of curiosity and questions: educational system based on admission of university, ahead-of-time-learning (learning upper graders’ material ahead of time before you learn in public school) through private education, and school educational environment.

           Most of all, educational system based on admission for university undermines the essence of education. Instead of the educational system giving the students inspiration and triggering desire of wanting to learn more, it has degraded to education which focuses too much on memorization and final grades, ignoring the procedure. School, instead of pondering upon what material to teach for the students in order to be actually helpful, considers how to send students to prestigious universities and make them earn high score on KSAT, evaluating them with numbers and scores. As a result, students have started to study not for knowledge or the sake of learning itself but for the exams and scores, leading them forget about curiosity but blinded memorization, accepting everything without any question. The second problem is ahead-of-time-learning through private education. Since they already have learned the material they are going to learn in school, nothing really interests them. Furthermore, the private institutions organize every material compact so that students are addicted to ‘feeding education’ than studying and investigating by themselves. This enhances students’ memorizing ability but deteriorates ability to study independently. Remain there other problems such as too many students per class and tight lesson plan. Since too many students are in one class and there are too much material to cover, teachers cannot pay attention to one individual student and answer all the questions they have, as a result, discouraging questioning.

           Memorizing everything for the sake of exams is dead education. We need to work on reviving education by questioning with curiosity and applying what we learned to our real lives. Not until then, can students become interested in learning and begin to appreciate their opportunity to learn.

 

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