I miss the feeling of learning something just because I wanted to know it — not because it was on a study guide or because I’d be tested on it — but just because it was interesting. It was the kind of curiosity that made me look up from a book and think: wait, the world is even bigger than I thought.
Somewhere along the way, that feeling got quieter. The shift was slow, like a battery losing charge. You don’t notice it until one day you realize the curiosity is gone. School didn’t kill it on purpose, but the constant stream of deadlines, rubrics and grade thresholds made learning feel less like discovery and more like duty.
I stopped following questions that didn’t lead to the right answer on a test. I stopped seeing knowledge as something alive and started treating it like something to collect, store and hand over for points. Research backs this up: overemphasizing grades can block genuine curiosity, shifting students’ focus from learning to performing, according to a Harvard Business School analysis. In other words, the education system’s rewards can slowly push out the very thing that makes learning meaningful.
Standardized tests take this problem even further. They claim to measure intelligence, but what they actually capture is access to resources, the ability to memorize patterns and how well someone performs under pressure — they only measure a small slice of human ability. Factors like test anxiety and socioeconomic privilege all play into scores, meaning a student’s test score often reflects their circumstances more than their actual capacity to learn.
I remember a conversation I had with someone who pointed out that if they had scored just one point higher on the ACT they would’ve been named salutatorian, a title that could have opened countless academic and career doors. The thought stuck with me: how can a single test number carry that much weight, when it says so little about the actual depth of someone’s mind? The issue is that we start confusing those numbers with brilliance itself, when in reality, they miss the most human parts of how our minds work.