Why in the world do we need to study?

Last week I had a test, and I had to read 116 pages to study for it. It wasn’t a nice experience at all. 116 pages, it’s so thick when I tried to measure it. How in the world would I remember all of these details and be able to apply them efficiently when I start my career two years later? Why exactly that we all have to study?

The question is never new, but until now I sometimes still find it worth-questioning. 116 pages, four big chapters, it’s a lot of information – and it went into my head like a flood trying to pass a tiny cave. It took great concentration not to get those info going off track – like the water. I got most of them in, somehow, and I did the test finely. But even though I just did it this morning, now I am not sure how much do I still keep in my head. A professor has told me that after six months, what I have learned will be 2% remaining. I think 2% is still nice enough if it’s useful. Don’t we, however, tend to remember random things easier? Then why do I have to study and study for hours and keep only 2% of those may-be-useful with me later? Only to past the test? Then the test is irrelevant in itself! I feel like I was wasting my time so much.

Another sad thing is that the GPA is negatively important. A low GPA will get a lot of attention from our future employers, but if we study the heck out of us to get 4.0, they are not gonna care! And why would they? It’s irrelevant to the job, except showing that you have no life.

When I was in secondary school I thought of a pretty good answer for the meaning of studying. I thought that to study was to train to endure hardship and to strengthen our minds. But it isn’t true at all. We can get those benefits by doing so many other things besides studying. And really, not every person would need those.

Ok, how about we go to school so that we have all the beautiful friendships and crushes? Screw that. Unless you talk in class all the time like me, you are not gonna interact much to your classmate. Let’s see, we may go to school for about eight hours (7:00am-11:00am and 2:00pm-6:00pm) and during this time, hanging out with classmates will be two hours at most (that is, if we use all of the three breaks we can have). So we only use 25% of the time for socializing. 25% is too low to be significant at all. And that’s in Vietnam. Here in America we have a 10-minute break for a four-hour class. We can do something else to have more time interacting with people than that.

This is what I think we should do: we only learn the essential and the relevant, which are short and straightforward. We read them over and over every week so we will remember them 100% at anytime. We also spend some time for training our bodies and our minds and our souls. We will also have a lot of time socializing and making friends. And since we don’t have to go through more than 10 years doing few things, we can actually get to our desired careers more prepared and mush faster! And guess what? We may use our hundreds of thousands of dollars to do something besides paying for the tuitions!

So what are we doing here? Why do we go to college? And why do we even go to graduate schools after that? Isn’t everything we need to know in the books and we can just read them whenever we want to?

Well, I guess going to school is really necessary because of some reasons I just cannot think of yet. Anyway, don’t you think my idea of how we should study make some sense?