Does School Gauge a Person’s Success in Life?

Success is defined as achieving respect, wealth, or fame. It is also considered a desired or correct result of any attempt. A person or something that is successful is a person or something that succeeds. These three definitions are very vague. Even the Merriam-Webster dictionary tries to define success by using the words “succeed” and “successful” in the definition, which most English professors would tell you is incorrect. You should never use words in a definition that are closely related to the one you are trying to define; it is the mantra for many English teachers and professors. If such a prominent dictionary has trouble being explicit in their definition, it tells you something—success is a subjective term. You may define success as having a family, having enough income to support that family, and a steady job. Another person might determine success in monetary terms, only. School does not gauge a person’s success in life because success should be measured over their lifetime. School is unable to provide a definitive definition of what success truly is. After a person leaves school, grades do not matter—it is whether you are respected and financially secure that matters.

      A straight-A student who went through Harvard Business School to sell insurance may not be as successful in selling insurance as a C student who went to a little community college. A person who runs a bookstore for 40 years in the same town would not be considered successful when compared to Barnes and Nobles. A grade-school teacher who is considered successful because she motivated her students to become something more; however, in monetary terms she will never be as successful as a basketball player. An engineer who makes $100.000 per year is considered successful, but what if that same person lost their job in a tough economy as did thousands of other engineers? Were they successful in life or only successful for a specific period of time? Would Donald Trump be considered a successful businessman, when he has filed bankruptcy more than once? If you consider the definition of success as being respected and financially secure throughout life, as well as touching the lives of others, then you can consider people successful who are not millionaires, famous, or inventors. 

     Schools have the difficulty of validating grades given to students. The stereotype is a poor school or one with low national test scores, will produce a less successful person, wherein an A-grade from that school is lower quality compared to a high quality school. Grade inflation and subject difficulty also affect the validity of grades provided by schools. A person learning communication techniques does not work as hard for an A compared to a person getting A’s in physics. It is subjective to state one person does not work as hard as another due to different subjects. A better argument is to look at where the emphasis is placed on when someone is in school.
      
      Schools place emphasis on the national standardized tests, proficiency in a subject, and whether a student follows the rules of compliance and behavior. Schools also have certain ways of teaching subjects, due to curriculum requirements. People learn in different ways and at different rates. One person can be an A student in school, but be unable to take a car apart and put it back together. An A student may be able to write numerous papers, while a visual learner struggles with humanities subjects because there is no visual and physical method for the person to work through and learn the concepts. Visual learners often need to use their hands to figure out how something works, versus using their minds to see the steps. Based on the different learning methods required for students, it is possible for some of the most brilliant and successful people to suffer in school. These same individuals may not reach their potential success because they have been trampled on and do not have the confidence to seek a successful life. 

      Success in a career is measured by different concepts. Job performance reviews assess if a person has initiative to start a task without being asked, has follow-through on tasks assigned, and provides appropriate customer service based on the type of career. Job performance reviews also look at time management, the ability to lead or follow, and missed days of work. A person who misses several days of work within a short period is considered to have job performance issues despite a valid reason for missed work, such as an illness. A person who follows commands, does all tasks required, and is helpful to customers may be considered a good employee, but no one worthy of note because of the subjective quality of the job performance reviews. Yet, that same person may have two children who are well behaved, getting good grades, and a retirement fund of $500,000 because they scrimp and save. This same person’s success in school could have been A’s, yet among other worker bee’s they are considered average.
   
       Schools cannot predict success in life, particularly, for creative individuals. A person who concentrated on writing the “Great American novel” or skipping school to build a search engine website would have been termed unsuccessful based on their grades. However, that same person could be making millions of dollars for their work today. A creative person can fail numerous times before success comes—Einstein is famous for saying “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Eventually he found the one way that did work and the world considers him a successful inventor of early history. 

   Schools also have trouble measuring the success of a student in life due to their lack of authority. Teachers are unable to provide discipline, to ensure that all students are getting a fair amount of time to learn the concepts. To a degree, parents should be following through with their children, but the success in life, of students in Japan and other Asian countries, is higher because teachers are more actively involved in the students’ lives. The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) has published studies based on math tests provided to various countries. Choosing schools in Minneapolis, Sendai, and Taipei, students in the Asian countries were able to answer the math questions better than students in the USA. In Asian countries most teachers have one to three classes they teach, versus a teacher in the USA who has several subjects or classes to prepare for. Teachers in Asian countries have more time to prepare for their classes and for one on one work with students. Teachers' responsibilities in the USA are said to be increased versus Asian teachers because their roles and obligations are different. USA teachers are supposed to teach multiple subjects, counsel students on fire prevention, disease prevention, and choosing careers. In this comparison, teachers with more time with students and fewer overall responsibilities show more successful students than teachers with multiple responsibilities, less time with students, and therefore fewer overall successful students. 

     The curriculum taught limits the success of students in their life. Lower education K-12 is repetition. The first year of college is repetition. When students reach upper level studies, they are expected to know how to do certain things; however, one’s education can create a lack in this knowledge. For example, high school focuses on writing academic papers in history and English. Most high schools do not emphasize technical writing or scientific writing. A research paper written for chemistry is not the same as one written in English. Students are also given technology to learn from versus 30 years ago. Students are taught earlier how to type on a computer than students 30 years ago, even though typewriters existed. Students know how to use calculators, apps, and computer programs that limit their abilities in a non-technological world. If a computer is not working, many younger generations today are unable to count back the appropriate change. A TV program had people go into various stores with cash. These people had to test the abilities of the cashier and whether they could provide the proper change. The program showed that some people had to get a calculator to determine the right change because they could not do something as simple as providing $18 in change for a $2 item, when a person paid with $20, unless the register told them the correct change. 

      Changes to the curriculum are being made. High school students are required to take accounting classes, but these classes are still limiting a person’s ability. Accounting courses are focusing on how to properly manage money, but not reiterating proper counting skills without technology. 

      Schools also fail to provide real life subjects in all aspects of learning. School cannot prepare a person for job hunting and filling the current needs of corporations or small companies. Etienne Duval created a cover letter with an animated rap video to apply to an architecture firm owned by Bjarke Ingels. Ingels told media he was impressed with the video; however, Duval was not immediately hired. Duval tried to catch the attention of BIG, the architecture firm—to stand out among thousands of applicants. Duval had the education and creativity to create the film, but it was not enough to be called up and given the job the minute it was seen. The real world is different from the A plus world of school. The project by Duval is receiving numerous likes and views on YouTube. Duval also gained 15 minutes of fame, but search for him now and it is old stories, not new ones saying whether he got the job that you will find. School teaches students to expect great things to happen if top grades are earned, if one completes hundreds of hours of extracurricular/volunteer activities, but what matters to an employer is much different. Employers are looking to see if you can handle the job, do the work, follow orders, and eventually move up the ladder of management—not if you got an A in a class. 

      Most students do not get the sense of how hard it is to be successful in real life versus school life. Even a student who holds a job and goes to school is still not ready for the shock of real life. When a student graduates, no longer has their parents for support, and must stand on their feet eight hours a day, work overtime, skip meals, and lacks the time to do the fun things in life—that is the point when life becomes clear. It is also the point that determines if that person will be successful or if they will struggle to put food on the table or hold a job. 

School is 19% of your life, if you live to 85. If you live longer, then it becomes a smaller percentage of your life. From the time you are 5 or 6 until you reach adulthood, you are learning, developing and changing. The trials you face in life ultimately determine whether you have the strength to stand up against those trials or not.
Overall, schools are unable to measure success because each person is an individual, with their own personality, strengths and weaknesses. Test phobias can crash a person’s grade point average, simply because the person is unable to correctly answer questions on the test, but in a more relaxed setting they could answer those questions and more. How one measures the education level of a student matters in terms of failing to determine success. What if a person does not show leadership qualities in school? The person might be kind and willing to allow others to be leaders, but this same person has the ability to own their own business, lead employees, and support their family. School politics, the clicks people find themselves in during school, define who they are, how they act, and how hard they work in school.

      Plenty of evidence shows that school does not have to be the defining element in a person’s life to show that they are a success. Ice Cube is a good example. He lived in a difficult neighborhood, Compton. His life could have ended up with him in a gang or dead, yet he has a successful music career, a family, and the respect of numerous fans. There are plenty of other celebrity stories that can show whether a person will be truly successful or not. Whitney Houston had a successful career, family, but her life was not a happy one. She was addicted to drugs, ended up dying because of those drugs. Would you think she had a successful life overall? It is hard to respect a person who has millions, a great career, and who ends up dead due to unhappiness and addiction. Whitney Houston was also a runaway who turned to modeling and singing at 17. By all public accounts, she was a good student, yet the concept of success is subjective to the reader. 

      The list is long for why schools are unable to measure the success of a person’s life; however, there are also some ways that schools can determine if a person is likely to be successful based on the definition of respect and financial stability. Schools test the aptitude of students for particular subjects and careers. They do competently assess if a person is a leader or a follower. Compliance oriented careers can also be a predictive measure of success, basically, if a student does well in a field of study that is compliance oriented there is a way to predict success. 

Tests in school are a measure of how well the person has retained and understood the information taught. A student who is tested on spelling words is being assessed how well they remember those words and how they are spelled during the test. The idea is if the student can spell the words correctly on the test and again at the end of the year test, then the student has retained the information they were taught. A student unable to remember what they have learned is either labelled with a disability or has not learned the information enough to be successful in life.
Career aptitude tests are created in two forms. The first is to assess what a person enjoys. Successful individuals all state one’s pleasures or hobbies made them more successful because they were engaged in an activity they enjoyed versus something they do not. The second part of the career aptitude test is assessing if the person has an affinity for those concepts. Are you better with reasoning and deduction questions versus physics? A test is designed to look at the answers.

      Students are assessed on how well they can follow the rules, complete the work, and if they will be able to lead or if they have to follow. The school can see this. It is supposed to be a way to measure if the student will be successful. 

Schools are recreating their curriculum to determine “what to measure” to determine if a student will be successful in school. It has been determined that a measure of success is based on interim progress and school environment. An excellent school environment is one way to measure if a student will be successful. The Wallace Foundation believes that a good school environment ensures students and faculty will be in attendance, thus students are able to engage in effective learning practices. Metrics are still used to measure a student’s competency in subjects, which are considered a formative way to assess the student’s performance level. A school capable of increasing their graduation rates is considered to have a better understanding of how to help students become successful in life versus a school that has a lot of dropouts.

      A stigma has been attached to schools with high drop-out rates. The stigma is that these students are not going to be successful. It sums up the problem that schools truly cannot determine whether a person is going to be successful in life or not. High school dropouts can return to school for their GEDs, go to community colleges or universities and become more successful than the football star. Schools have long been focusing on the wrong curriculum and strengths in students, preventing them from being able to truly assess the level of success a person will have in life. 

      Yes, career aptitude tests, determining where a student’s interests lie, and their ability to follow rules in school will help outline their success in life, but it is not a complete gauge on whether a student will become successful in life. Only that person can determine if they feel their life has been a success or not at the end of it. Consider Alfred Wegener a German scientist, meteorologist, and geologist. It was not until his death that his theories about the continental drift were accepted. Galileo is another. Galileo was by modern day accounts a successful person, but at the time his theories regarding the earth were considered ludicrous. School is only one portion of a person’s life and it can be a time of struggle. How can it be a true gauge of the success of a person when life is filled with much more than grades? It cannot. 

      Success is measured by the amount of respect, financial stability, and overall life you lead. What is considered successful to one person is not necessarily successful to another. A person working for a modest income as a freelance writer feels successful because their creativity is earning them money; however, to another more financially driven person having half a million dollars is a successful life. A person is still growing in school. A person can still be growing as they age because life’s trials and tribulations have a defining factor on whether the person has the ability to stand up against the troubles in life and succeed financially, in raising a family, in finding love, or gaining respect.