Geniuses Can't Be “Taught” Through a Test

Edited by Derek Gutierrez

College, one step into that festering hell hole of a place and you will feel as if you can't get the foul scent off of you. Testing is just one extension of this foul odor. It is the embodiment of Michael Myers in real life: a never ending ruthless monster who will slowly creep on you and kill when you least expect it, and your quick rushes to do anything to stop it will do nothing but boost its hunger.

Does anyone remember how to solve a problem related to the pythagorean theorem? Or how about a problem that talks about the major conflict and character tensions in Act III, scene one in Julius Caesar? Of course not, now why is this the case? Testing at its core is a way to memorize information to later regurgitate it onto a test without actual understanding of the concepts involved to make you have a deeper view on the subject. Testing is not a way to create your own ground breaking work, it's simply to learn about someone else’s ground breaking work. No genius, such as Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton, ever took a test to discover new things.

The reason why people don't remember the classes they took is due to lack of emotion on the subject. Memory Key’s website has a lot more information on this but to summarize,if you have a traumatic or triumphant moment happen in your life you will always remember it. Sometimes the greatest struggles in your life are the reasons why you are the person you are today. When students take subjects on things they aren’t into they won't be invested most of the time, and it will feel like a walking through a meat grinder everytime they decide to study.

The people at Pearson simply don’t care about this fact. John Oliver, a british political commentator said it best when he compared Pearson to Time Warner Cable. “Either you never had an interaction with them and you don't care, or they have ruined your f*$#ing life.” This evil empire controls the vast majority of the testing industry and has destroyed countless dreams of everyday Americans with their overpriced material. The idea that to study you need to buy the 15th edition of a textbook over the 14th edition simply due to some innocuous differences is absurd.

I’m not saying that you should pack all of your things, become a college dropout, and spin the wheel of life to hope you land somewhere special. What I am saying is that to truly be great you need to think outside the box.

Doing internships and having hands on experience will make you indispensable compared to someone who only studied a textbook all day and all night. We should all take notes on what President Obama said when he was discussing the issue of education, “Don't tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend too much of a year preparing him to fill out a few bubbles in a standardized test, we know that’s not true.”

Education has largely turned into a business. A way to take peoples money in exchange for the possible chance of getting your dream career because you own a fancy piece of paper. The problem is that instead of learning crucial information about 401ks, taxes, or how to balance a budget, they decide to spend it on more test taking and more cramming of useless information. They pretty much are throwing a baby into a pool and expecting it to swim. Some make it out, and some don’t.