By: Gabriel Dunatov

“Tonight’s the night that I’ll finish everything,” I think. “When I get home, I’ll start immediately and I’ll get all my work done!”

That’s my dream, anyway. The reality is far less succesful. Staggering through my front door after school, I find it impossible to begin my work. As the day slips into night, I force myself to begin. Yet in the midst, the pen drops from my hand. My fingers pause on the keys. My eyes drift out of focus. Every night, I am accomplishing less and less. While I push my assignments farther away, new ones appear on the horizon. A mountain of papers, worksheets, and assignments threatens to collapse over me.

For someone who has been working his tail off for years, I cannot help but feel angry. It is not that I lack motivation or a work ethic; both remain, just subdued. The reality is that I am fed up with spending my days locked in a vicious struggle with meaningless, repetitive work that teaches me nothing.

A quick look around tells me that I am not alone. A lot of my peers across America saddled themselves with the toughest schedules possible. Some of us did it for college, others for our passion. Regardless of the reason, I think we could handle it at first. Yet eventually, we reach a point of no return.

For the sake of every exhausted student, I beg to ask of those in charge: what is wrong with an education system that burns out its best and brightest before they have even reached college? Why is school tearing us down instead of building us up?

The reason rests, I believe, upon the deluge of assignments that we receive daily. Now let me make something clear: this is not my entitled whine about too much homework. I get that we need these assignments to show what we have learned and to retain the material. Honestly, we are lucky that Prep recognizes our fallibility and gives us a manageable workload. I am not protesting the concept of homework, just the paradigm that underlies it in American education: that more busywork will make us better students. But it does not. After suffering for hours over never ending study guides, worksheets, and problem sets, the knowledge will flee as soon as we take the test. In my eyes, homework only has value when it is an active learning process, not a passive repetition.

All in all, I know our exhaustion is linked to how we work so hard and receive so little. Of what use is the promise of success if we grind our minds to shreds before we get there? This theory in American education that heaping more busywork on us will yield better returns is a bitter fallacy. It takes the most ambitious and passionate young men and women and turns them into slaves to their own dreams. Homework is just the tip of the iceberg; the College Board, Common Core, and schools themselves are trying to turn school into a slog from one standard to another. Is it any wonder that we are falling behind?

At the end of the day, however, nothing we can do will fix the education system. I wish I could find a cure, but all I can offer is my observation: that it pays to hold on to a dream that can lift you up even when besieged on all sides. Wherever our strength has fled to, I hope that we can find it again quickly. After all, God knows this world will not let us catch our breath.