Why students and schoolchildren need essays

Now many of the requirements of modern education are quite controversial. So, many pupils, students and their parents do not understand why such an element of education as writing an essay may be necessary, especially in the form required by their teachers nowadays. As a result, many students simply prefer to order an essay online instead of preparing on their own – due to lack of free time, lack of interest in the task itself, or for fear of getting a bad grade.

So why do we need essays now? An abstract in its original form is a document that contains a study of one or more sources that have been compiled into one small document that can be read quickly enough. In and of itself, writing an abstract should teach high school and college students how to search for information, compose properly formatted research papers, and learn how to conduct analytical activities.

But is it really necessary? Establishing strictly scientific requirements for an essay is hardly necessary for most schoolchildren and students – they do not need to understand the peculiarities of scientific writing, scientific ethics and the correct methods of registration of scientific papers. However, for some reason they continue to be forced to write essays, and with strict compliance with a lot of formalities – indents, paragraphs, the indication of sources by strict rules. All this does not add interest in this kind of work.

And what about in other countries of the world?

In modern Western education, essays have long been abandoned in favor of essays and other types of independent work, group assignments, and joint activities with a supervisor. Teachers and educators argue as follows:

• Group activities better develop students’ communication skills and teach them how to interact with each other, whereas essays are strictly independent work.
• Essays allow the student to find and develop his or her own opinion on certain issues, rather than dryly retelling information from sources that, moreover, have no practical use for science.
• The format of creative and semi-game-based activities allows students to memorize information much better and actually produce interesting materials while learning about a given topic.
• Abstracts are too vulnerable to possible plagiarism. Now many students literally copy the information they need from the Internet. Work in the essay format, which requires a personal assessment of the material, makes sure that the student has really considered the problem and not provided ready-made information.

Thus, teachers, educators, and officials should consider stopping the assignment of writing an essay, especially on a permanent basis, because today this element of education has almost exhausted itself in principle.