THE GRIEVANCES OF A DISGRUNTLED STUDENT
“The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.” - Martin Luther King Jr.
Does it not concern you that if you look at what school actually rewards—shortcuts, the appearance of learning over the thing itself—we aren't building thinkers with morals? We're only building the very same people he warned us about.
Look around any high school in the United States and you’ll find the same thing: kids stacking their schedules with clubs they don’t care about and volunteering for causes they didn’t even know existed until Mommy signed them up. Of course, not because they’re passionate, but because it “looks good.” This is a phrase I’ve gotten all too familiar with the past couple of years. The college admissions process has turned an entire generation into performers and the system rewards them for it. The kid who genuinely loves something but can’t package it correctly loses to the kid who packages everything correctly yet loves nothing.
King’s warning wasn’t abstract. A person gifted with reason but no morals is dangerous precisely because they know how to work a system. And unfortunately, we have built an education system that teaches students exactly that skill—how to work it—and then we wonder why cynicism and dishonesty feel so normal in this generation.
As I write this I realize that I am listing my grievances towards a system that I am just as complicit in and yet the only thing I feel I can do is write this article to you. The ordinary student I just described could be anyone, it could be me and that is what scares me the most.
I also understand that as you read, you may think to yourself: who is this high schooler to sit and tell me what is right and what is wrong? But every day, we let an algorithm do exactly that, and sadly, school has left a vacuum big enough for it to exploit. Our generation is drowning in information and yet still finds itself starving for context. The platforms we rely on reward the loudest, most extreme takes because those generate the most engagement. We have been handed conclusions our entire lives and never taught how to reach our own.
We learn history, sure, but history without context for what is happening right now is just memorization. And the students sitting in these classrooms today are the voters, legislators and leaders of tomorrow.
So, if we want to secure a future worth inheriting, why are we graduating students who cannot name their own representatives? Why is there no class that teaches me how to navigate the political reality I am walking into? Yes, a teacher might occasionally pause a lecture to connect something to a headline. But occasionally does not constitute a curriculum.
We will hand these students a ballot before ever handing them the tools to use it responsibly. By the time most develop any political awareness, they have already spent years being shaped by algorithms that have no interest in making them informed. There is no class that teaches you to think about power, how to question who holds it or why the headlines you scrolled past have anything to do with your life. A generation that cannot think critically about power is a generation vulnerable to those who abuse it. It is ignorance that does not know it is ignorant, which makes it infinitely easier to manipulate. Despite being a uniquely politically vocal generation, we are shockingly unequipped to think critically about what we actually believe.
This systemic silence extends beyond the ballot box and into our bank accounts. My father has been telling me to invest my money for as long as I can remember. For just as long, I have been telling him to relax, getting annoyed with how often he talks about it. Yet recently he said something more thought-provoking: that everything he knows about money he had to learn himself and that I should be grateful someone is telling me now. At my age, he didn’t have someone constantly advising him on how to manage his money. I am grateful, but I am also angry.
I’m not saying I wish he wouldn’t give me advice, but the fact that my father teaches me instead of the institution whose main goal is to prepare me for the world says everything about what school has decided to prioritize. No personal finance class. No lesson on how interest works, how to file taxes, how to build credit, how to invest. At some point you have to stop and ask what exactly we are preparing the youth for.
The world these students are walking into is complicated and politically fragile, and school has spent twelve years preparing them for none of it. We have spent a decade perfecting the art of the “shortcut,” learning how to package ourselves for an admissions office that rewards the appearance of passion over the thing itself. Martin Luther King Jr. warned that reason without morals produces the most dangerous kind of criminal. By ignoring the political and financial realities we actually live in, our education system is mass-producing exactly that danger. We are graduating high-functioning performers who know how to work a system, yet we have no idea how to fix it or even how to survive within it.