After spending the semester critiquing the state of education in America, I think it is time to do a little bit of reflection.

Between this group of RCL spring semester writers, we have discussed STEM education, charter schools, educational rights, individualized learning, and many other things that are completely valid discussion points.

And while all of these things may be important, and may find a way to help out our nowhere near perfect education system, it’s time to take a step back.

All of us may have a picture of what our ideal world is—whether it involves world peace, economic prosperity, political efficiency, or a mix of these and more, and we know that our ideal world does not exist.

This holds true for the field of education.

We may want more STEM education in the nation’s public schools (as I have even wrote about previously), but there is an obvious concern. There is absolutely no way that the public school system will be able to hire a sufficient amount of teachers with STEM passion—and if they could, it would cost way too much money.

We may want a more personalized education for each student. But when one teacher is handed one classroom of 25 students, it’s not entirely realistic to think that every single student will receive the attention he or she needs.

We may want all of our public schools to have a higher quality. But simply put, it is incredibly difficult to convince high-quality teachers to teach at an inner-city school, where they may be needed most. The cycle seems to be never-ending. Inner-city teachers struggle too much with potentially unmotivated students, causing they themselves to lose motivation to make a difference.

In fact, we have no solid solution to bring quality teachers in to our system. What kind of intelligent scientist wants to go teach high school chemistry for $45,000 a year when they can instead go in to chemical engineering and make 6 figures? I can’t blame someone for picking a much more lucrative, and frankly more enjoyable and challenging career for their own personal career path.

Being a teacher is partially an act of civic engagement (for those who have alternatives to becoming a teacher) because of the job it entails. It’s hard to convince people to commit their lives to an act of civic engagement.

I personally have considered becoming a high school calculus teacher (which is somewhat evolving into potentially becoming a math professor), but the profession just doesn’t make sense for me. It could get quite boring to teach the same thing every single year for the rest of your life.

My point is, there are just some things out there that we constantly argue about that have way too many roadblocks to ever come into existence.

As I said, we need to reflect—specifically, we need to reflect on what the true purpose of a K-12 education is. Is it to give individualized education? Not necessarily, considering this is the entire focus of post-secondary education. Is it to learn important skills for the rest of your life? I would also argue no, considering most people don’t remember a thing they learned in high school, and many of those people are doing just fine in life.

So what really is the purpose? For me, I think I had a great high school education. The reason? It taught me to be motivated, driven. These innate skills I have developed will be so much more important to me than anything else I accomplished in high school for the rest of my life.

As a society, we need driven people. Those who are motivated are the ones who do great things—those who make an impact.

In K-12, we learn motivation (or at least I did), by just being thrown into the situation. We work hard to succeed in high school, which will lead to acceptance into a good school, which will lead to success in college, which will lead to a successful career.

This baseline knowledge is more important than anything else. As a country, we need to focus on teaching our young to be civically engaged, and motivated. It’s a simple approach, but if it is focused on more, the education system may be improved much more than we think.