In some schools, students are made to complete academic projects over summer break to retain the information they learned in the year. Weather or not they should be made to do these projects in the first place is a discussion in itself. Looking past that, some people believe students should create their own project, rather than the teacher. Presumably because the students may not be so hard on themselves when it comes to assigning a workload, and they may even have a little fun with it; however, the downside to this, of course, is that students do not necessarily know how to teach themselves. They may not create a project that challenges them in any way or helps them retain what they learned in school.

To begin, Many people would argue that students should not be forced to complete work over summer vacation; that being said, having students create their own project may make it feel less like work,and more like a fun activity, and if they are learning the material then who cares? The problem does become evident here, "are students that create their own project actually learning what they need to?", and they likely are not. It goes against a child, or teenagers nature to actually try in something like this. Majority of the students made to create a project would likely do the bare minimum, and nobody would learn anything valuable like that.

To continue, This does not mean the alternative is the best option. Both ideas have a plethora of pros and cons. Teachers are more likely to give you far too much work, and so much work that needs to be done during a period of relaxation may totally kill initiative, making a student not want to learn, even when school starts again. Teachers will inevitably reuse the same project for years on end, perhaps because they believe that it is still good material, or rather they are too lazy to create a new one each year. Either way, this does not help the students. The human mind is constantly evolving, and our knowledge of everything likewise, projects will quickly grow outdated, then even fewer people will get a quality education.

With all the negative aspects of each idea fighting one another in a battle over what is the worst one, a spectator can't help but wonder if we have strayed too far into the deep end when it comes to the education system. An argument over education should not be "which of these ideas isn't god awful?", but rather an argument over what is the better option. A reprisal of our nations education system is long overdue, it hardly works, but finding what does work is much easier said than done. Perhaps if there were an alternative option that did, it would be in place by now. Maybe the future generations will figure it all out, or maybe we are supposed to remain as the primitive apes we are today, perhaps that is never meant to change.

To conclude, when creating a project with the sole purpose of teaching someone about something, or how to do something, it is imperative that they know all the information that needs to be learned. This necessity would eliminate pretty much every student, simply because they are learning it. In the words of famed Gonzo journalist, Hunter Thompson, "if something is worth doing, it's worth doing right", and while the teachers may overdo it, and they most likely will not understand how much it pains the student to do their work over break, they need to create the projects. The teachers also need to be sure that the information they are teaching alligns with the times, no lazyness should be tolerated. A middle ground needs to be reached, with a mix of fun and important learning material. Perhaps, the students and teachers could work together when creating a project, that way a nice middle ground could be achieved. This would have to be a yearly thing with each new class, so the information in the projects would also be updated yearly.