Colin Gallagher

Ms. Boyle

English 160

7 September 2021

 

Why School is Crucial in Creating a Critical Thinker

 

At a certain point in my life I was suddenly able to have cognitive thoughts. I can’t exactly explain when and where that switch happened. What is cognition? What’s the difference between that and memories? For starters, you remember pictures and details, but as a kid you don’t remember words, not me at least. Around age six, my mind had shifted from illiterate to literate. My brain was growing rapidly, like a sponge it absorbed whatever information it could. I was a very impressionable kid, I desperately wanted to learn━ I even asked my mom to opt me into pre-school. School is very important, and I believe if I had been enrolled sooner I would be a smarter individual. I want to argue why school is the most important resource a kid has to develop their individual literacy. This is a topic I am very passionate about, seeing how my access to education was taken for granted all those years. For the purposes of my argument, I need to quickly recap the milestones I achieved throughout my entire education, and how it made me who I am today.

 

School is one of many ways a kid can develop literacy, and it is by far the most important. In school, kids learn together, they compete and share information. I remember my elementary school classrooms plastered wall to wall with colors and numbers and maps and words. There were no desks, only tables; we learned as a group. I was able to work together and build friendships, I talked and learned of the unique cultural backgrounds of my classmates. It was a privilege to grow up with those people.

 

So far I’ve only discussed the ways school can shape you as a social human, but the general education a kid learns from school is just as important. First things first I learned technical schools and motor functions. In pre-school I was taught things like tying shoes or zipping your pants or buttoning up your shirt. We were given toys to play with, things to touch and interact with. Then in kindergarten, we learned how to read and write. We started off with basic books, maybe three or four words per page. Then it became six words per page. Then it was twelve words per page. Then, we were writing words of our own! After seeing how sentences were formed, we were given pens and paper and told to write. I don’t even remember a teacher specifically instructing us on how to write, it was just something that came natural to us. Everytime I wrote something, a teacher would come over and tell me what I did right and what I did wrong, and then they showed me what I meant to write. I copied what I saw and became a better writer. By the end of kindergarten, I was capable of writing a paragraph and drawing pictures. My speaking skills weren’t completely developed but that was okay, I was great at hearing, but I was also great at tuning people out, for better or for worse. 

 

In first grade, we were introduced to basic mathematical concepts, simple addition and simple subtraction. I can remember struggling to learn the concept of zero, but eventually something clicked. Second grade is when things got more complicated, numbers with two digits or even three digits. In addition to math we also learned cursive writing for English, but never really used it. Third grade is when we were introduced to the order of operations, also known as BEDMAS, but back then we learned PEMDAS. This was the first time I had to force myself to memorize something, and that was the multiplication table. I still don’t remember all of it to be honest. In third grade I also learned how to write reflectively, and how to tell stories of past experiences. In fourth grade, I learned the concept of division. They tried to teach me long division, but I never got the hang of it until recently. Fourth grade is also where I learned how to write fictional stories, and with that it was clear that I loved comedy and the absurd. I remember writing a story called “Cinderella and the Magic Pants”. What was special about this assignment was that I had to type it up on the computer and print it out. The piece demonstrated how I was able to take a story that already existed, one that I didn’t really like quite frankly, and morph it into something entertaining to me. It was honestly really clever for a fourth grader, it had this twist ending where Cinderella was arrested for public nudity at the end because her pants had disappeared at midnight. Moving on, fifth grade is where I learned how to write essays. I will be completely honest with you, I hated it. We were given a notebook with yellow paper for drafting our essays, correcting spelling errors and inserting words. Then after the draft, we would rewrite them neatly on loose leaf. I don’t remember what I wrote exactly, I just remember hating writing for extended periods of time, which actually hasn’t changed with time. Still, developing these writing skills were crucial in preparation for the real world.

 

By the end of fifth grade, I was ready to leave the basics behind and move onto a new frontier: middle school. Middle school was a huge advancement in education for me. We were given our own routine schedules that we had to follow without the help of anyone, we were completely responsible for roaming the building. This differs from elementary school where you would stay in the same room for the duration of the day, but in middle school you were given a sense of freedom, and we were even allowed to make some choices. You could decide if you wanted to eat lunch, or spend that time in the library. You were also given the alternate choice of going outside for recess or staying in the cafeteria. Middle school is important in ways I’ve never been able to appreciate until now. You give a kid a schedule with room numbers and no directions and they have to learn independence and responsibility. You also develop navigational skills and time management. In elementary school, there was a big focus on English and math, barely any time was dedicated to science or history, but in sixth grade my classes became more elaborate. I learned about Earth science and world history, but I also learned about “ the system”. When I say “the system”, I mean society and capitalism, government and laws and rules and regulations. This is when I realized that one day I would have to get a job and make money to support myself, and that there’s life after school. I didn’t like that realization. But I pressed forward through middle school, and it was dreadful. I experienced bullying and alienation, and I also had to deal with mean, wicked teachers. The books we were required to read got bigger and bigger while the words on the page got smaller and more complicated. Eighth grade was the most important to me because I was put inside a drama class as an elective. I didn’t want to take it, but being forced into that class helped me realize my passion for the theatre. High school was spent pursuing that passion, I wrote a play and had it produced, I learned advanced mathematical concepts as well as extensive essay writing. I’ll never forget how I was able to befriend each teacher to the point where I could talk to them on a personal level. I had developed an eager and outgoing personality, and I was finally feeling like an adult. I was having debates and learned philosophy, had great seminars and discussions. I had a lot of fun with the projects knowing I could put my creativity into them. I auditioned for plays and musicals and got cast in a few, I even wrote a play during Junior year. That was the height of my life and I had no idea how far I had come. The second half of junior year and the rest of my high school experience was spent on a computer, and I honestly felt like I had learned nothing but agony, but I digress. Graduating high school was more of an achievement than I realized months ago. I’m now a fully functional adult, educated and literate, able to write sentences, paragraphs, essays, research papers, capable of holding discussions and having difficult conversations. I had made friends and developed a unique identity for myself. 

 

Now that I am in college, I’m given this time to reflect on my past and how far I’ve come. I still have really clear memories of pre-school and elementary school, and I realize that no one could have come as far as I did without that twelve year long experience. It’s funny really, in fifth grade I realized that I still had many more years to go, and all that time passed in the blink of an eye. 

 

So now we’re here. We’re contextualized. We know what my primary school experience was like, and we know how it shaped me as a human. Some would argue that a kid learns literacy better from parents or real world experiences, and that’s true to an extent. Kids learn language from listening to their parents and all the adults that surround them, but who’s going to teach them how to write the words that they hear? Some parents just aren’t qualified to do so, they were taught by teachers and teachers must continue to teach each generation. We already know how great of an environment school is, you make friends and you learn together. This way you don’t feel like you’re isolated in these brand new concepts, you’re never alone. If a kid is homeschooled all their life, chances are they won’t be prepared for the real world like a kid with a public education would be. 

 

I have something to admit. School wasn’t my only teacher growing up. In fifth grade I got a Macbook Air as a gift from my mom. This was my first piece of personal technology, and it truly was a fantastic teacher. I watched Youtube videos and joined digital chat rooms and made internet friends. I feel like I don’t have a New York accent for this reason, I spent a great chunk of time on voice calls. I admittedly didn’t go outside as much as I should have, but when I did leave the house I would go to my best friend’s house, someone who didn’t have an accent either because his dad was Jewish and his mom was Italian. I did most of my reading online, I read webpages and blogs and scrolled Facebook. 

 

In summary, there are many factors that contribute to a kid’s literacy, and they’re all very  important. Learning through different sources is crucial to creating a critical thinking human, and I am living proof of that statement. Whatever your literary sponsor is, whether it’s your mom or dad, whether it’s the internet or the television, none of it would mean anything without school.