By Kendall Harshberger
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Recently, I watched the documentary “2 Million Minutes”, known to many Carmel High School students as this school’s 15 minutes of fame. For those who have not seen it, this documentary follows two CHS students, two Indian students and two Chinese students to compare their study habits and preparedness for college.

If any of you are anything like me, you went into the film thinking you already knew how it was going to turn out. The foreign students would be studying just about 3,000 percent more than the American students and they would get into their incredibly prestigious schools while the American students went nearby to IU or Purdue. As the opening credits began, I mentally braced myself to feel ashamed of the American school system.

At first, all of my predictions were proven right. The film depicted the American students as procrastinators and who shopped and went to football games, while the students from other countries were mainly shown talking about their rigorous study schedules from their seats at school, commuting to and from school and at their homes doing homework and preparing for admission exams.

But as the documentary went on, I started to feel something completely different than what I had expected: appreciation. For our school system. Call me crazy (or lazy), but I’m glad to have a school system that leaves room for extracurricular and social activities. As I watched the students from China and India work so hard everyday to get into the top colleges in their country, I found it hard to imagine the immense pressure put on them by not only their peers and parents, but themselves as well.

These teenagers dedicated their entire lives to academics. For example, one boy featured in the documentary from Shanghai named Jin Ruizhang was the top student in math at his school. His nighttime reading was a college- level calculus book. The film shows him getting an e-mail of acceptance from a college of his choice-but not into its math department, as he was hoping. He still got into the school, but he was somewhat disappointed. His personal goals and expectations were set so high it made even his large achievements look like failures.

I’m not refuting the importance of academics. But extracurricular activities can be important as well. They can help a student explore career interests and can teach skills such as leadership and communication, all of which are incredibly important in the competitive “world market” the documentary mentions several times.

I also began to appreciate the amount of choices we have in America. Throughout history this country has been known as the land of opportunity, and I think we can still see that today. Although college is the most widely accepted route after high school, our society is open to many options. The documentary displayed that this was not often the case in India and China.

Rohit Sridharan, a student in Bangalore, India, described this.

“In India, once you get into this academic course and you are serious about it, you don’t have much of the option to choose between academics and something else,” he said. “It’s either academics and nothing else.”

I’m not saying the American school system isn’t flawed. The documentary makes several good points on why we should change, and I agree with some of them. But if you dedicate the entirety of your teenage years to academics and nothing else, many other important features of growing up can fall through. As teenagers, we should be teenagers and exhaust all of our opportunities offered by America before we’re thrown into the real world.