educational standards

From birth to adulthood, we are raised to fit into a few particular standards, and failure to do so is considered bad. These standards could be good organisation, or exceptional social skills, however its obvious that we cannot all become exactly what is expected of us.

In school and other places of education, it is far more obvious that some standards are expected of everyone. These standards are things such as excellent behaviour, exemplary attendance and an outstanding work ethic, and anything less than these standards is considered punishable.

If someone misbehaves in school, let's say they get into a physical fight with someone else, the school will discipline the people involved, but rarely will they find out the reason behind the fight. The person who began the dispute may have been abused by someone the night before and feel upset and vulnerable, which may cause them to lash out without properly thinking about the consequences. But this doesn't really matter, what matters is that the person did not meet the expected standard and will therefore be punished instead of helped.

It goes without saying that not all instances of behaviour which is considered to be below par are caused by abuse, but I do believe that our behaviour is not random, and that how we act is often subconsciously impacted by what we experience in our lives. But not many people focus on the reasons behind a negative behavioural outburst, but instead focus on the punishment to try to prevent it from happening again.


There are times when people do meet the standards expected of them, and this is followed by enormous amounts of praise where they are told how amazing they are. But are they really amazing, or are they just good at acting? Someone can quite easily be very organised with their work for school, but the rest of their life can be a complete mess, both physically and emotionally, but this person is told how great they are at being organised. The same goes for an excellent work ethic. A student may love art and spend hours doing art work at home, but neglect their other work, like maths or biology, but their art teacher will praise them for being so committed and for having an outstanding work ethic, while their other teachers hand out detentions and other forms of punishment like there's no tomorrow.

This praise and punishment causes us all to find ourselves aiming for the delicate balance of perfection within education, but failure to achieve this balance will only ever make us feel like we have failed ourselves, when we have in fact not failed anyone. We all have different skills and talents, some of which don't fall under any criteria specified by any educational institutions, but that talent or skill is something that we don't fail at, but instead excel.

At the start of this post I said that this impacts us from birth to adulthood, and this is because as young adults, people often realise that educational success is something that means nothing to them, but personal achievements are all they aim for. Some people realise this sooner, others later and some not at all, but it's typically when we become young adults that we understand that the standards that we were expected to live by are nothing more than large wishes of what I will refer to as 'the lords of education' that need not be granted by every single person.

The only standards that we should live to are the ones that we set for ourselves, and the only achievements that we aim to succeed at should be the ones that we believe would be beneficial for us and those around us.