Teachers love the threat of the next big academic jump. It gives them leverage against their students. Elementary school teachers enjoy the greatest amount of ammunition. Back in fifth grade my teacher loved to begin lessons with a forboding “Next year in junior high…” followed by a complete lie claiming sixth grade students were all required to write everything in cursive or had already mastered telekinesis. Blaming unfortunate curriculum on the upcoming year’s requirements was a recurring theme throughout my pre-college days. And it got really old, really fast.

I can only assume, since none of my professors have pulled out the patented “next year” statement, that I have reached the pinnacle of education. All the scapegoat usage of my past teachers has led up to these four years. So what’s the ulterior motive of college? If I’m not learning meaningless skills for our next step up the educational ladder, why am I here?

We’re here for perfection. College is a time for perfecting the self-destructive tendencies we’ve acquired since we first entered the halls of learning years ago. All-nighters, pizza binges, meal skipping, compulsive over-drinking, Web addiction, etc. Thanks to the skill with which most students execute these tasks, enough years are being shaved off the end of our lives that we won’t even have to worry about paying off student loans.

It’s often said that our schooling teaches us not only a myriad of impractical information and an early distaste for authority; it teaches us “life skills.” In reality, students do anything they can to avoid learning these lessons.

Take time management for example. As students moves through school, their workload and obligations gradually increase. An idealist would think that this would correspond with increased ability to manage time. As always, the idealist is wrong. We don’t learn how to manage our time better, we learn how to sleep less at home and sleep more in class. By the time freshman year of college rolls around, all-nighters are common practices and stealth sleeping is an art. To facilitate chronic sleep deprivation, most college students ingest a swimming pool worth of coffee per semester, give or take a gallon.

Teamwork is another gem thrown out by sadly optimistic outsiders when rattling off the non-academic positives of education. There’s no such thing as teamwork. Group projects consist of one or more students avoiding work because they’re incompetent and one student taking on all the work because he or she knows the other kids are incompetent. That kid gets an early taste of swimming in coffee to sustain life. I know, I was one of them. In college, the idea of working with other people is deeply disturbing. Regardless of how well we have to get along with others in the ‘real world,’ the only team spirit you’ll find at this point in education is in “World Of Warcraft” guilds.

Finally – work ethic. Nothing kills the drive to produce quality work like public education. It’s understandable, though, when running on two hours of sleep and enough caffeine to power a suburb in hopes of making a fast-approaching deadline, quality isn’t the priority. Pride is reserved for things that are truly important, such as beer pong and MySpace layouts.

I’ve learned a lot of life skills because of school. Thus far, unrelenting cynicism has proven the most useful. But whoever is spreading this rumor that school is teaching us these Aesop-esque lessons, must be the disillusioned products of home schooling.