College as an Unschooler: the Ironic Oxymoron of my education

As I entered the wide world of college education, a few of my realizations about the way formal education truly functions were solidified. The first one was that achieving the goal of being educated is truly determined by the motivation of the student. Even though I knew this before, it was truly solidified as I attended my first class of a required course. Students slept through class, turned their work in late (or not at all), and didn't read the assigned material. While this is typical for the unmotivated student that is forced to sit in a required course, the was juxtaposed by the contrast with the students who I encountered while attending my unrequired course. Students wanted to be there, had fought hard to be in that class, and were determined not only to achieve the grades they aimed for but were there to truly learn the material. They were internally motivated to learn the material. But whenever the same students were externally forced to learn material (as one of my classes demonstrated by having frequent pop quizzes) they quickly began to have negative associations with the material, and begin to loathe and neglect it. By frequently assigning the pop quizzes, my professor was forcing us to constantly review the material out of fear of points being taken away. This made many of my peers begin to dread and stress over work that would have been (and had been) naturally achieved otherwise. By unschooling children, we give them the freedom to follow their passions and pursue their interests. It's essentially letting them sign up for a "life-long class" where they want to be, and where they work hard to truly learn the material. They are internally motivated to learn and achieve their goals instead of being externally forced to.
The second solidification was that the points don't matter: quantitative means of measuring education are flawed and often unrealistic. Even though my university only used standardized tests seldomly, and almost exclusively as a diagnostic measure and a way to "test the waters", the idea of standardized testing as means to evaluate how much a person learns is fundamentally flawed. I watched as my friends stayed up for days studying for an exam, and then failed the exam because they were so sleep deprived. They knew the material, but had been so externally forced that they pushed themselves to the breaking point and failed their exams. Others wouldn't eat and would lose their focus, and then fail the exam. And more of my friends had anxiety over exams and would fail the exams. A person could know all of the material presented in class and could be unable to put it into test form. The level of information that they had retained would be the same, but the exam results would say something completely different. In college, education is more personalized to the student and the students are allowed more leniency than in grade school. But, what if a student is not passionate about (or not good at) a required course? What if their knowledge and education aren't on the test? Then the exam shows that they have no education. The student that fails the English exam may be writing exceptionally beautiful poetry in their spare time, and yet the standardized system would deem them uneducated. Personal issues, sleep deprivation, a hectic schedule, lack of proper nutrition, different areas of education, passion, anxiety, how the knowledge learned is translated into the form of the exam, etc. all affected how the exam results were determined. The exams were generally structured to measure the level of learning that one had achieved, without taking into consideration the individuality of that person. There were too many variables that affected the exam than just the knowledge that the student had: therefore, an exam is a flawed way to measure how educated a person is. Additionally, exams are generalized and cannot accommodate the needs and learning styles of a large percentage of students, and therefore cannot be an effective way to quantitatively measure the level of learning accurately.