essays from the Netherlands
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- Created on Friday, 23 September 2016 08:03
- Written by netherlands
The importance of school
School is important for everyone, without exceptions. School is important because of several things. The first and utmost reason is the fact that we learn the basic skills we need for our jobs later. From writing to adding and subtracting to basic geography. We learn to write in order to express ourselves without using a single spoken word. We learn to add up our risks, so that we know when we should or should not do something. We learn where places are, so that we know where in our country somebody is from, or even from which country a foreigner is from and where that country lies.
We improve these three basic skills, along with a large group of others I have not mentioned, during the whole of our school career. In time we learn to write in different languages, learn multiplication and how to divide, and the basics of volcanoes and other processes in or on the earth. In the end we can solve hard math problems, are we fluent in different languages, and know everything about our earth. All this knowledge will help us in our life. While we work for our jobs, we can use all this knowledge to work more efficiently and do better at whatever interests us.
Another major reason why school is important is because it shapes us into the person we are today. We learn values here at school which we might not have learnt at home. We make a giant part of our friends at school and those friends have a major influence in the way we turn out. If we would have been born a year later or earlier, we would have had totally different friends and would be a different person altogether. We develop our social skills with our friends, and we learn how to handle difficulties with them. They help us find our taste of music, fashion and sometimes even help us finding our sexuality.
So school is very important and without it, we would not reach our full potential, which would be a waste of our possibilities. Without school, the cure for cancer might be stuck in somebody’s head without them knowing it. With school we can help them learn how to research things, and in the end have them reach their goal.
And as Edmund Burke once said: “Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.”
Jasper de Jong
4vd
Proof that you can do it!
When it’s June, it’s getting harder and harder to motivate myself for my schoolwork. The school year is almost over, the weather is getting better, although this period is the busiest of the year. Of course I want to go out and swim. Everything is better than studying , but still I’m working as hard as I can, because a high school diploma is a good base for your future.
I think that a diploma on the first place shows which degree of work you can handle. This is important because they look at that in a job interview. Before you can talk to the personnel officer he sees your curriculum vitae first and your diploma’s are the most important part of it all. Probably they don’t even invite you for an interview if you don’t have any diploma’s.
Secondly I think that a diploma proves that you have certain persistence and that you put effort in your work. If you can’t finish things, getting a diploma is very hard. So your diploma also shows companies that you can persist.
At last you learn at school certain skills like collaboration and summarizing. These skills you also need in your future.
Often you hear people say that the knowledge that you learn at school is also available at internet, a calculator helps you to calculate and the spell check on your computer makes sure you don’t make any spelling mistakes. I’m not sharing this opinion, a conversation in German is really hard if you need to check every word on your phone and a spell check does not check grammar.
Other people claim that you can make it without a diploma. An example is Richard Branson, the founder of the company Virgin. He stopped at his 16th with his high school education. At the moment his wealth is estimated at 4,6 milliard US dollar. This is an exception, not everybody is as lucky as Richard Branson.
Even if it’s June and great weather, I know I want to leave school with a diploma. So when I want to swim I think about this and I grab my books en study a bit more. With a diploma your future will be a lot easier!
Jochem van Klooster
Do we really need school?
A question asked by every student, every year. The answer usually given is: yes, because you will need this later on in your life. But do we? Will we spend our adult lives analysing poems? Or is the quadratic formula only useful in our classrooms?
In order to become good at something, whether it is a sport, playing an instrument or something completely different, you need to train. The same goes for your brain, if you do not practise you will have a hard time learning things later on in your life. If we would not train at all, further studies would need to be much longer in order to get to understand even the basics of mathematics, grammar and other subjects. The other option would be to stop education all together, however if we were to do this, there would be no-one to take on several jobs, we would have to live without doctors, scientists etc. This would stop our society from developing the way it does now.
Primary and secondary education are also there to give a basic understanding of all subjects. In this way, we know what our options are when we have to choose our profession. Without this opportunity we would choose based on what we think we might like, if it turns out this is not what we were looking for, it is nearly impossible to make any big career changes, as we do not know anything about other fields of study. Even though a fair portion of the subjects will not fit your interests, they will still be of use as you now know for sure it is not what you want.
Schools give us a widespread basic knowledge. Even if we do not know everything about a subject, having some knowledge helps to be able to talk others, as they most likely not all have the same interests. Learning about many different subjects expands your vocabulary and makes it easier to link between different matters. There is also a chance that if the subjects are chosen right from the beginning, we might miss things we did not know we needed. For example, topography is not the most fun to learn, for most of us that is, but without it we would not even know what our neighbouring countries are.
Altogether, I do not think it is completely fair to say we will need everything we learn for our future, however we do need it now, to discover our interests, our likes and dislikes and to build up some basic knowledge. As is said ‘The future lies in the hands of the children’, I think this future is better off in the hands of children who know what to do with it, and in order to achieve this, yes, we do really need schools.
Nick Voorneveld