The RTH Journal - Education

When did learning become a race instead of a journey?

Published June 7, 2026 - Patrick O. Aryee

The day we started ranking students, we stopped educating them. We started sorting them.

There is nothing wrong with knowing where you stand. But there is everything wrong with making the rank the point.

The Race Nobody Signed Up For

Nobody asks a five-year-old if they want to compete. We simply place them in a system that measures, compares, and ranks from day one. By the time they are teenagers, most of them have forgotten that learning was ever supposed to feel like anything other than pressure.
The race was already running before they arrived.

What a Journey Looks Like

A journey has landmarks, not finish lines. It has detours that turn out to be the most important parts. It has moments of stillness where you stop and ask — where am I going, and why?
A student on a journey reads beyond the syllabus because something caught their curiosity. They fail an assignment and ask what it taught them. They connect what they learned in one class to a question they have been carrying since childhood.
That student is not the fastest. But they go the furthest.

What We Must Reclaim

Speed is not intelligence. Finishing first is not understanding deepest. The student who takes longer to grasp something — but grasps it completely — will outperform the one who rushed through it every single time life demands real thinking.

The journey does not have a podium. It has a destination — and that destination is a life you built with your own mind, on your own terms, for your own purpose.

Refuse the hive. Take the journey.