Since the beginnings of our student lives, until we’re done with high school, all of us are forced to be good at something that maybe we weren’t born to do, at all.

I am, in fact, a believer in the “growth mindset”: the belief that intelligence can grow according to how much effort you put into something — but, the reality is that when you enter college, you are free to make your own decisions in so many other areas of your life, maybe every single one of them — So why should you keep studying so hard to get an A or an B in math, which you were never too good at, when you want to be an English teacher? It just makes no sense.

According to the science news website LiveScience, an individual personality is completely formed around the 1st grade, which means a 7-year-old is completely done with the formation of his personality and mindsets for life.

Of course, some of everyone’s ideas about life will inevitably be subject to change, but not the roots of it: According to Christopher Nave, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Riverside, “We remain recognizably the same person.”

It is possible to argue that we do take some of these lessons with us throughout our lives, and in fact, this is true — I, at least — and please tell me if this was also you — have needed to do long division in my daily life. Either use that calculus while shopping, or while doing any other ordinary activity, like cleaning the house.

Maybe a good solution would be a midterm, during which students would only need one semester of math (a math class that would actually be useful in daily life), if, for example, they are majoring in a language or in an art form.

No, I don’t want extremism, in anything, or to say that things should change drastically. My whole point is not that hard to understand… It’s just what everybody already knows: The educational system needs to change.

I truly don’t see the point of spending that much time on something that will be forgotten about as soon as the semester is over. In fact, it feels like it’s just one more thing to be worried about, another weight on students’ shoulders.

College classes have already such a huge level of difficulty — for us to simply spend 18 years of our lives trying to decide what we should major on, getting confused about a lot of things in this particular aspect of our lives, only to finally get into college and deal with something we could simply be done with in high school.

If you search Google for “Why do colleges have general education classes”, you will come across these exact words: “Schools want their graduates to be well-rounded in their education. They require these general education courses to help students gain a well-rounded education which they hope will serve you throughout your life after graduation.” Well, I guess they are not 100% right about it. Neither am I. I know we could — and do — use some of the things we learn in general education classes, but, like…

Do we really need all of these classes? I just don’t understand why so many general education classes are needed. Honestly, it just feels like it takes so much of students’ time, which makes college so much longer to finish, because, well, you want to be an engineer, but you need to know how to do a poetry analysis of a Shakespearean sonnet, just because…

Why do they need to take so much of our lives with something that just have nothing to do with our passions? We should at least have the power of choice… Or at least, the ability to have our voices heard.