Young Writers Society

Random statement that I should fit into the essay somehow:
If you teach a man biology, he can be a biologist. But teach a man to read -to learn- and he can be whatever the heck he wants to be.

The actual soon to be essay:
You can hire all the teachers you want, and give them funding and students to teach, and the students will learn and maybe some of them will enjoy it. But most of them will only learn what to memorize and where to check the boxes on the tests, maybe some of them will even get big numbers like 82, and 95 on their work accompanied by red letters saying ‘great job!’ and ‘well done’ but then, after 12 years, when you let the students go, you’ll tell them to go find out who they are, and that now they can do whatever they want. But why would you expect them to know that? Why would you expect them to be able to do anything on their own? That’s not what you’ve spent 12 years ingraining in their minds. You’ve spent 12 years telling them, do this, do that, you might call it teaching, but I don't care what you call it because I don't care about you because you don’t exist, you're just some hypothetical reader whose personality is being horribly manipulated by me because I’m the writer. I have control.
The thing is, if your idea of ‘teaching’ is to tell some people how to do something, then your setting yourself up for failure, you can tell someone to stop taking things that aren’t theirs, but that probably won’t stop them, they want the thing, so they take it, their being logical, using their brains, not yours -really you should be proud of them for being so independent- if you want to teach them to stop taking things than you have to show them the consequences, or you want to take something from them so they know how it feels (of course the latter option only works on those rare beings with some empathy) if you show them the consequences (i.e that they’ll go to jail which is boring and sad) then they can be convinced to stop doing something. But I'm talking about teaching, right? That's about getting all the knowledge and experience in your head into someone else's so that they can do what you can and maybe more. So how does the previous example, which is about teaching someone not to do something, relate to school-teaching which is (or should be) about giving someone the knowledge and experiences that will help them with life. Well, remember that last example? You show the person the consequences? Well, that's just it, show don’t tell, (don’t worry, this isn’t like your english class, this time we’re being serious) consequences are what we remember, not words, the problem with school, it that it tells the students a lot of words and then tests them to see if they remember the words. Well the thing is, remember, how the consequences are what people learn? Well there are two consequences of taking a test. 1, they fail the test, and so they remember the shame, low numbers instead of high ones, and the knowledge that you have failed and because of that you aren’t as smart as the people who passed. Or the other consequence is that you don’t fail, you get a high number and everyone thinks you're smart, also, you remember that getting a higher number (I’m talking about grade btw in case you haven’t figured it that out) means that when you grow up your more likely to get a good job and have lots of money. So, since you passed, the consequences are good, so what you’ve learned is that 1 passing makes you feel good 2 passing means you're better than the others 3 all you have to do to pass is memorize the right words and stuff. See that last one? Yeah, most people eventually pass a test, and so of course this is what gets ingrained in their minds, this is what school teaches us, we don’t remember the words we memorized, we only memorized them to pass the test, so we remember the test answers but not what they mean and eventually we forget them.
So how do you teach a student the words rather than the consequences? Well you can't unless they care, and that's usually how students end up actually learning from school, eventually the student has an experience (usually not when there at school) during which something triggers the test answer they had memorized a while ago, and suddenly something clicks and they realise how the word corresponds to something useful. But that doesn’t always happen, and anyway it’s a huge waste of time to keep teaching people on the off-chance that maybe some of them will end up caring and actually learning. So, back to the original question: how do we teach them the words and not the consequences? Well, we don’t. The answer is in the question, the consequences are what we learn from and we can never learn from words (with the exception of those reasons described above but those are kinda consequences anyway) it’s really simple, we just need to present the students with real life, real consequences, real problems -in short, experiences. We learn from our consequences and consequences are experienced, that's how you teach, you don’t tell them the answers and then present them with fake experiences and ask them for the appropriate memorized answer. You put them in a place where they don’t know what to do (an experience they should be prepared for once their adults) and then you help them figure out the answers, not only will they remember what you taught them, but they will also care more because they actually experienced it, and after those 12 years, they will be totally used to being asked: what do you want to do? Who do you want to be? ‘Cause they’ve already done all that! They've had a taste of real life! And now even if they don’t know what Profession they want to practice, they do know what they want to do, who they want to be.

You ‘ve taught them how to teach themselves and learn from their experiences. Never in anyones life will they be given the answers and then given the problem, they're given the problem and they have to teach themselves how to deal with it. Now there is some knowledge that is infinitely more useful than the number of cells in the human body.

Okay, ill admit it, i was kinda mean to biology there but, i promise i do like the rest of science.

Also, one last thing I wasn't able to fit in. school is stressful like seriously, why?? This is yet another problem. I know I kinda sound like I have some pretty high, maybe unrealistic standards, but, if my standards weren’t so difficult to reach, they wouldn’t take a lot of work, AND SCHOOL NEEDS A LOT. OF. WORK.

FIRST OF ALL,ELVES ARE CALLED GNOMES??!!?? AND THEIR MOSTLY SHORTER THEN MEN?? LIKE WHAT!! HOW? WHO WAS THIS TOLKIEN??

ok so then Legolas is just offhandedly mentioned as just being some random guy who helps lead everyone to safety. and....and.... WHAT?? I mean I know this probably isn't the same Legolas as in LOTR, cause this was written before that and Tolkien probably just decided to re-use the name......but still it's so weird to have him just appear as some guy living in Gondolin. Like????!?!??!!

ok last one. so about half of the story is just an almost point-by-point narrative of the battle, which I find really interesting cause Tolkien usually kinda breezes over the specifics of his story's battles and instead focuses on the significance of the battle and how people died whether the battle was won or not and it's sad either way (think the battle of the five armies in the hobbit -it's a full action filled part of the trilogy in the movies, but it's just a chapter of the books, and afterward everyone's depressed.) Anyway, but though it's a little boring, I actually think that out of all of Tolkien's stories, the Fall of Gondolin might actually make a decent film adaption that could still be (for the most part) faithful to the book. There were just so many incredible parts of the battle that would make beautiful scenes without the need for a lot of explanation.