Most people my age aren’t experts on anything. Malcolm Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours of experience or practice in a discipline in order to truly master it, and frankly, those 10,000 hours are tough to come by when you’ve only lived 157,000. But at the transitional, watershed, almost purgatory age of 18, there is one area where the almost all 18 year olds in the country are absolutely the experts of: school.

From kindergarten to the twelfth grade, we’re looking at 13 years, of around 180 days of instruction, with roughly six hours of schooling per day… we’re talking around 14,000 hours of plastic chairs, dry erase markers, and hard fluorescent lights for the average American high school graduate.

My name is Yinon Raviv, and I’m an incoming freshman at UC Davis, and I, along with 3 million peers in the Class of 2014, am an expert on the topic of public school in the United States. Realizing just how critical my area of expertise is to our nation’s future, especially when it’s commonly acknowledged that our system in dire straits and is in need of retooling, has given me a meta-awareness and a healthy sense of self-importance that every Millenial requires in order to truly be a part of this generation. And as I hear politicians much older and more powerful than myself haggle and debate on what’s wrong with our educational system and what can be done to improve it, I find the urge to invite myself to the table and offer a user perspective on our nation’s most important product.

It might have been during a practice AP English test where I had to decide between the two perfectly reasonable answers on whether The Great Gatsby was a cautionary tale about upward mobility or a time piece that aimed to capture the excessiveness and flamboyancy of the Roaring 20s, or it might have been during an Algebra 2/Trig chapter test where I approached a question with a different way of solving it than the one showed in class, and got a different answer (that still worked!) than the one in the official answer sheet, when I realized just how much of our educational system relied on (what I feel) a massively faulty way of testing knowledge and understanding.

Forget about the notion of trying to test in subjective areas like literature and English… by having two or more equally valid answers, and only having the option of one, I was being told that it didn’t matter that I recognized how both choices made sense. I was being told that if I picked the wrong choice, as designated by whoever made the test, I would be wrong and lose all points and would be one step farther away from an A and one step closer to a failing grade. And if I dared thought differently than how the book wanted me to think? Loss of all six points. Wrong. It was a clear path to a life of menial labor, McDonald’s and Walmarts, and a lonely and destitute death if you don’t bubble in the right answer.

Does that sound melodramatic? I wouldn’t be the first teenager to do so. But you know what else we teenagers (and students as a whole) always whine about? “When am I ever going to use this stuff in my life?” “Why do I need to know about the French Revolution if I want to be an engineer?” “Why do I have to know about the quadratic formula if I want to be a dancer?” And so on. From my experience, that’s part of the common struggle of being a kid here — complaining about school from the first grade to graduation, which ends up feeling like an emancipation.

The common response to this grievance is twofold: it’s not always about being practical but about being educated about the world around us (“we forget our past, history will repeat itself” for frustrated history students), or, that despite the fact that we all have specific interests and pursuits, it’s important to be well-rounded.

For the longest while, I felt a strange disconnect. Those responses made sense, so there wasn’t much of a reason not to buy-in. But taking the actual classes, sitting through the subject for two semesters and going through the grading process, I always felt like there’s some kernel of truth in these complains. Why would so many people repeat the complaint so many times when they’ve been hearing the same responses since the second grade? But at some point in my junior year, I realized that the problem doesn’t lie in what we’re learning, but rather, how we’re learning it.

Frankly? Multiple choice tests are a load of bull. Choosing between four choices where only one is correct (and thus will net you the points you need) doesn’t teach replication, synthesis, critical thought, or creativity… it teaches a simplified deduction process. It teaches the student to try to game the system by catching patterns in the test. It’s completely irrelevant to any real-life applications. Google asks its engineers to write code on a whiteboard, not pick the best choice for the next line out of four. Writers are asked to create compelling, relevant, and fact-supported narratives, not decide which literary device out of four, narrowed down to two, makes the most sense in a span of 45 seconds. A multiple choice test will never determine if a person works well in teams, supports her coworkers while making her bosses look good, presents well in public, or teaches and trains her peers by being a good mentor and leader. Simply put, the rote memorization and regurgitation isn’t real learning, it’s a narrow system that emphasizes very specific types of skill and knowledge.

It’s not the existence of high stakes multiple choice that’s a problem, in my opinion, but our reliance on them. They make sense as tools to assess certain skills in certain situation. The SAT and ACT are absolutely tests on preparation — no college admission officer truly believes that they indicate intelligence. No business school dean believes that the GMAT will indicate success as a businessperson, nor any law school dean find the LSAT the be-all, end-all to good lawyership. There’s obviously more to getting accepted to those institutions beyond scores. However, as the primary method of testing and an enormous influence in the final grade in classes (at least, in my personal educational experience), they add a murky filter to the concept of a GPA. Is a GPA an indicator of intelligence and diligence, or is it an indicator of prime test-taking and fact memorization? Doesn’t that take away value from the Aptitude Tests, as the GPA becomes less and less differentiated from a test score?

That’s why I think so many students continued to get frustrated. Noone has anything against learning about Classical Literature or Trigonometry or the War of 1812 (well, maybe a few do). More than anything, it’s because students are being forced upon a subject that doesn’t interest them through a teaching method which fails to engage their curiosity. A math student won’t mind taking math multiple choice tests, as they already relish the subject and couldn’t care which way they’re being assessed on it. It’s when we’re challenged to step outside our comfort zone, intellectually, and are then evaluated on our progress through arcane and ineffective indicators of true knowledge.

It’s why the Common Core makes me hesitant. Some of the language regarding the content of what’s being tested is promising, sure, but as the old adage goes, it pees on our legs and tells us it’s raining. It does nothing to alleviate the over-reliance on high stakes testing. I also think that educational reform shouldn’t just hit the standard of what we’re learning, but moreso the methods and processes of instruction. As I’ve outlined before, I don’t think students have a huge issue with the subjects as much as the teaching methods themselves.

Before I get into my final point, I do want to thank those teachers that have really pushed me, and apologize to them. I’m not talking about you, Mr. Puccinelli, or you, Ms. Potter, or you, Ms. Long. You are the exception to the norm. And that’s exactly the problem.

Think of the standard classroom. You have the teacher at the front of the room, the only person in the room dispensing information. All the chairs are directed towards this one singular being who has the monopoly of information. It’s up to the pupils to absorb as much of the information as possible, as what this teacher is saying is the definitive truth on this subject — supplanted by the textbook. The students may do the worksheets, or have in-class activities, but their success is based on how close they are to what the teacher wants them to know. The student is passively learning or passively tuning out.

I just think that this method disempowers the student. It may teach a deal about discipline, but there’s a point where high school students should have the opportunity to have their intellectual pursuits leave an imprint on their developing and ever-changing personalities. It may teach a deal about diligence, but most classes give the students little room to fail and make mistakes, which, in my opinion, is a core humanizing experience where people, especially young but really, of all ages, learn about their skill set, their limitations, and their potential to grow. It limits the methods in which students learn and puts the very act of acquiring not just new information but new attitudes and world views in a neatly defined box, a box that is conceptual and not based in the reality of how we learn.

Do you want your students to learn? Not just to pass the exam, but to be knowledgable and curious denizens of the subject? Not just to be square pegs in square holes, but to learn, grow, and feel inspired as the future workforce, citizens of this country, and the generation to inherit our world?

Empower them. Challenge them. Don’t just assign them a project, but pose a tough question to them and give them the means to answer it. Let them fail but make sure they understand that lesson so the high-achieving students broaden their horizons while the low-achieving students build determination rather than losing motivation. Test them verbally, and see if they can respond to changing situations not with facts and information, but foundational ways of thinking and budding instincts in the field. There are so many ways to educate that go far beyond a power point, a textbook, some worksheets, and a scantron.

I hope important people read this whole thing and think about this. I hope politicians see this and consider it in their policy. I hope businesspeople see this and consider private-based innovative solutions and ideas. I hope engineers and creators see this and consider the limitless potential tech has to offer for education. I hope teachers and principals see this and consider what works and what doesn’t. Most importantly, I hope students, young and old, see this and find their own voice and invite themselves to the table, like I’m doing, and bump up the most underrepresented yet most highly impacted perspectives on the state of our education.