A Good School Essay

A Good School            A good school is one that focuses strongly on academics, but one that also offers a wide range of extracurricular activities in order to produce the most fully well-rounded individuals entering into their adult lives.  This school would have to have a reputation for being academically rigorous, in which students’ minds are constantly being challenged instead of being permitted to “coast,” as is unfortunately so often the case.  Even the most basic entry-level course would be designed to keep the students from becoming intellectually detached, focusing perhaps on in-depth special projects over the course of the term (instead of the basic barrage of quizzes, exams, and papers, which will force the students into keeping up with their classwork but not necessarily challenge or interest them).  Students’ performances will be gauged by what they have learned and how they are able to realistically and practically implement that knowledge in the “real world,” not just in the classroom.This school would focus not just on expanding the minds of its students, but on preparing them in practical ways for their futures.  Every discipline would have its own career-path focus, maybe even having entire classes dedicated solely to studying what kind of careers are available to someone with a degree in X, how best to search for such careers, what kinds of experience such jobs would be expecting in advance, how best to interview and prepare for such jobs, etc.

  This would prepare students for their futures in a way that all the textbooks in the world never could, truly giving the graduates of such a school a distinct advantage over others.  This school would also have a strong network of associates through which to place internships for its students.  Internships are another excellent way for a student to prepare for his/her future career and really get a feel for what it will be like, and a good school would have the most resources available to its students to aid them in acquiring such internships.A good school, especially one that is able to meet all of the above requirements, would also have to have some of the brightest and best professors at its disposal.  These men and women would have the utmost dedication to their students, willing to give each one all of the one-on-one attention they could need as well as nurturing their academic and intellectual growth.

  (This of course would also require that the school be rather small, with a very small [fewer than 30] student-to-teacher classroom ratio.)  These professors would also have to be very creative, able to instruct a classroom of students in a way that is continually interesting and challenging, maximizing the students’ potential and their ability to retain their new knowledge.  Again, this sort of approach would probably require course-long specialized projects, or something else of that nature that would be distinctly different from the average classroom environment.A good school would also have to have a strong interdisciplinary focus, recognizing that for a person to be a well-rounded individual that person cannot spend all of his/her time concentrating on one subject or discipline.  This would require an expanded load of core requirements, tailored to each students’ major/minor.

  Along with being academically well-rounded, a good school would also recognize the need for students to be socially well-rounded as well, and would offer its students a host of various extracurricular clubs and activities for them to participate in.  This includes sport teams, fraternities/sororities (social- and academic-based), honors clubs, women’s studies groups, writers’ groups, student poetry readings, student art shows, student-produced and performed theatre, groups that offer political or religious involvement, groups that focus on volunteer work of various natures, and so on.  A good school would enable their students to have access to all these types of social and artistic outlets in order for their students to be as well-rounded as possible upon graduation, and to be intellectually and socially (and perhaps physically, spiritually, and emotionally) fulfilled people.  A good school is all of these things for its students, and that is the absolute bottom line: a good school exists for the betterment of its students.