I think a mistake that a lot of schools make is they teach you to be a diligent person and don't worry about anyone else. Schools should teach us to worry about other people and want to educate everyone, not just ourselves. Most jobs in this country are formed out of laziness and ignorance. For example, a lot of people are too lazy to fill up their own bottles with water so bottled water is a multi-billion dollar industry. I have a water filter system at home and I have these glass Sobe bottles and Calypso bottles that I continuously refill and put in my fridge so I don't ever have to buy bottled water. Sure the water filter system may cost more money initially, but within a few years I have more than paid for it in not buying bottled water. Not to mention plastic bottles cause a lot of pollution. Same goes for a lot of things. I think schools teach you that you are better off "keeping up with the Jones's" just running from one event to another mindless consuming than to actually slow down and conscientiously think about your consumption and find ways to minimize it. I know this doesn't sound like an answer to education, but for some reason to me it does. Think about textbooks, how many people actually read those from cover to cover? Most people read a few articles in them and then put them away and never look at them again. Is that really an effective way to distribute information? Instead of having kids carry around books that they will hardly read why not just forget about the books altogether and just have printouts of the article and have kids reuse them. Or have public laptops that students can rent if they don't have their own and require them to have laptops in class to access the articles they go over.
My last year at college felt exhausting when I was almost going full time. I feel like I am constantly on the go from one thing to another and I hear all these lectures and read all this information and I wonder, is all this really necessary? How much of this information am I going to remember? Why do I have to document so many things? I'm not even going to look back at my documentation even if I do document it. Why does life have to be so complicated? At the end of the day I felt empty because even after all this time doing things I don't feel like doing, I still feel like "I'm not keeping up with the Jones's." I used to think that I was in the minority of people about not liking school and finding boring, but then I started to realize that a lot of people don't like memorizing facts and reading boring material over and over again. We all just do it because we were taught that is "what is normal".