We, the university students of America, are just like fleas.

While this may sound outlandish, I currently relate to a flea more than I ever thought possible. I don’t mean this in a literal sense — my vanity is, quite obviously, not characterized by a dusty-colored hard shell and Insecta features — but a metaphorical one: when fleas learn a repeated behavior, it cannot be broken.

Fleas’ unbroken behavior was proven in an early 2000's study called “The Invisible Lid.” When scientists placed a number of fleas in a glass jar, they initially tried to jump out — but after the lid was placed on, the fleas stopped attempting to escape — they learned the boundaries of the new environment they were in. When the lid was removed after a few days, the fleas didn’t jump out for the rest of their life spans, only bouncing as high as the phantom lid boundary permitted.  

I relate American students to fleas because, for years, all we knew was the structure laid out for us — the lid over the jar. For most of us, our everyday life looked something like going to school every day, doing our homework dutifully, being reprimanded for bad grades or behavior, partying here and there… because we didn’t know any different.

Then, the COVID-19 pandemic happened in 2020. The jar lid shattered. 

Aside from the enormous challenges COVID-19 presented to hundreds of thousands of public schools in the U.S., we as students learned what it meant to live an unstructured life for the first time ever in our academic K-12 careers. We, at last, jumped beyond the set height the phantom lid limited us to. Instead of a typical eight-hour school day, students could learn on their own account and pursue new routes of education.

In my case, the remainder of my 2020 sophomore high school year was canceled all together with online logistics for classes still in the works. Living in a mountainous area, I was extremely privileged during this time — using the break from academics to hike and enjoy unstructured outdoor living, reconciling my love with nature and finally analyzing the world around me. 

There is a lot you get to see and experience when you aren’t confined to classroom walls for most hours of the day. 

The problem is, when a flea realizes that the lid above them is indeed a phantom, they can never continue bouncing up to that one set height over and over — they have now experienced life outside the jar. 

As students, we were handed self-determination, whether stuck in our rooms or permitted to go outdoors we could relatively manage our own time and pursue personal hobbies throughout our school day. In the 2023 school year with a steep drop in COVID-19 cases since January, schools are nearing the normal procedures of lecture, test, homework, repeat — a lack of fluidity opposite to that of the self-determination we had. 

It is hard to continually force students into lectures when we have a new understanding of how we approach academics. Bottom line: lectures aren’t all that for us picky Gen-Zers, if it’s our place to comment, because we now know that education can be so much more.

Education is a sincere privilege in the U.S. that I do not take lightly, and as a woman in this country, I feel honored to be pursuing the degree that generations of women before me fought for. I understand that globally millions of women are denied the right to education. 

That makes it even more precious. It’s not a commodity, but a privilege to be educated, so, let’s ditch the lectures and busy work. Envision career-tech-oriented classrooms, hands-on education and the freedom we were able to once experience pulled into classroom settings today. 

Don’t get me wrong, the jar (pre-COVID-19 classrooms) still holds great importance in giving us fleas (students) structure, but that world above the jar holds so much more that I hope school systems, whether high schools or universities, explore.