Is School An Escape Or Another Prison?
School is one of the few places in life where adults will expect you to be a kid and an adult at the same time. School can never really decide between the two even when the decision is obvious. You would think once started high school you would gradually be more and more treated like an adult but instead, the restrictions that schools put in place are as restricting as ever. When all you have ever know is a restriction when it comes to school It’s hard to get used to college at first cause it’s two extremes going from no freedom to an abundance of it. On top of this lack of freedom is an enormous amount of pressure from various sources that all trace back to school. It doesn’t matter if your a great student or an average student or a below-average student the experience is going to be similar and at some point in time you are going to feel that weight on your shoulders from school. When polled about their feelings towards school nearly 75 percent of students had a negative view of school in general. That’s a crazily high number for us to ask students to spend 7 hours a day in a place they dislike at the minimum and often times even hate. School offers no reprieve from the rest of life instead it continues to pile up the pressure we receive from other facets of life. This routine of constantly going to a place where you do not enjoy yourself understandably drains students over time. If you ever looked at students’ attitudes about school towards the end of the semester you would understand very clearly we educate children at a very high cost and that cost sometimes is their mental stability. Now mental health is something that in recent years has received more attention and is finally being deemed as serious issues but that movement still has its limits. We often as a society glaze over the impact school has on a student’s mental health whether it be positive or negative. In fact, in my experience, the only way as students we coped with stress or anxiety was essentially laughing the pain away amongst each other. Laughing at our failures. Laughing at the workload. At a certain point, you just become numb to it all and that’s when grades truly suffer. On the American College Health Association, 2015 survey over a quarter of the student population said they were suffering from either Anxiety, Stress, depression, or sleep difficulties related to school. So of course students are not always performing to state-mandated standards they are busy trying to maintain their own sanity. We seemed to overtime to move from a focus on the well-being of the students to the well-being of their grades and future prospects but honestly, the future doesn’t matter if they aren’t given the correct attention now. Teachers have to conform to the guidelines laid down by the state so we can’t put much blame their way but the way these lessons are implemented is something they can very much be in control of. Perhaps instead of always using a conventional method to test students’ knowledge whether it is a test or an essay or a project teachers instead find innovative new ways to test students’ knowledge. A test is not the only way to prove a student’s intelligence about a subject. The sheer abundance of tests or quizzes in high school is honestly insane. In a regulated amount, tests should have a role in students’ life but not to the amount we see today in society. Test do explicitly teach anything they simply assess how well a student can recall a lesson. I have been witness to many cram sessions where students know much of the material during the test but literally a week after it went. We can’t even fault the students for this cause by that next week there is another test your brain needs to make room for. It’s difficult for teachers to communicate through different subjects so often times out of ignorance teachers end up assigning tests or other assignments around the same time. This emphasis on tests the lack of awareness by teachers when assigning work and the pressure put on students all lead to this gradual degradation of any motivation in students. Until the only motivations left are fear and stress. Take it from the students themselves in this New York Times article where one student says “Because students have this kind of pressure on them they purely focus on doing well rather than actually learning and taking something valuable away from what they are being taught” or another students says “One of the biggest flaws in the American education system is the amount of pressure that students have on them to do well in school, so they can get into a good college. Because students have this kind of pressure on them they purely focus on doing well rather than actually learning and taking something valuable away from what they are being taught.” With all these problems being voiced you would think some change is due but instead, once again students’ experiences are ignored and even further some adults are trying to push the idea of year-round school. My response to that is simple if months of school is already enough to make students hate it what happens when that’s their life every day over and over? Society needs to listen to our students or our future truly is in jeopardy.
