Horrors of Education
How would you feel if you went to school 6 hours a day 5 days a week just for you to become stressed out of your mind after your teacher throws tons of work at you? Sadly, this is the harsh truth for many students around the country. The current way of teaching results in teachers having to bombard students with work so they can learn the curriculum for a final grade, ultimately causing stress in students.
American schools are supposed to be a place of learning and development. However, schools give loads of work to students and get them to memorize and reproduce facts onto paper instead of actually learning which creates massive amounts of stress. One of the biggest reasons schools do this way of teaching is because of class size. It is physically impossible for a teacher to simultaneously teach an entire class of students the curriculum and still focus on individual students. Another reason schools do this test based learning is because of the lack of concern by the government. If the government wanted to, they could implement nationwide mandates which forces schools to actually teach students and not just throw information at them to memorize for a good grade. In recent years the government has created programs such as Race to the Top which ”is a multi-billion dollar U.S. Department of Education competitive grant program to support education reform and innovation in state and local district K-12 education” (“Race to the Top”). This, along with other programs before, has definitely had some impact on the school system but not the greatest impact because it did not mandate schools nationwide to follow these precautions and in general improve their system. In 2015, the government created the Every Student Succeeds Act, which “reduced the authority of the U.S. Department of Education over state education systems by giving both states and school districts more power to determine their own testing standards, academic assessments, and intervention methods” (“Every Student Succeeds”). The success of these acts is debatable because if you ask any student what schools focus on most they are going to say grades are the most important thing. This is the exact problem of the school system, grades are most valued when teaching should actually be the most valued thing in school. It is undeniable that the school system focuses more on grades rather than actually learning. Teachers just give loads of work to students for them to memorize and reproduce on tests for good grades. Even though they know this way of teaching is ineffective and doesn’t help kids learn, they have always been doing it this way and have no incentive or support to change it. This results in unmeasurable amounts of stress on the students only for them to get a good grade instead of learning.
Stress rates in teens are very high and have risen thanks to school and the system of teaching going on. Jennifer Villeneuve and others dug deeper into this problem in their article “Easing the stress at pressure-cooker schools: Requiring students to conform to a narrow definition of success increases stress without improving learning”. The article mentions the formation of the organization Challenge Success and talks about the survey they have been giving to high school students across 200 schools since 2007. The survey from 2019 revealed that, “The 8,223 middle and 35,596 high school students surveyed confirm high rates of stress as well as adverse consequences in these high-pressure school contexts:” and, “more than two-thirds (70%) of high school students reported experiencing exhaustion in the past month” (Villeneuve). These numbers show how the current high and middle school students truly are stressed and that this stress can have other implications such as exhaustion. This is important because teens are the future of our nation and if they are facing stress at these young ages then this can cause them to go to extreme measures to relieve this stress, which will result in the generation becoming corrupted and unprepared for life. In order to decrease this stress in teens the source of the problem has to be found. In the article when surveying kids on what causes their stress it states, “More than two-thirds (69%) of middle school students and more than three-quarters of high school students (79%) named grades, quizzes, tests, exams, and other assessments as the main reason for their stress” (Villeneuve). This shows how the main cause of stress in teens is school and their schoolwork. This information, of teens stressing over grades and tests, backs up the theory of schools focusing more on grades than learning. Since there is such a large focus on getting good grades, kids only care about their number score and don’t actually care about the learning which is far more important. This reliance on good grades can also be seen in the article “PSA: CHEATING is actually a really BAD IDEA” from Girls’ Life magazine which talks about cheating. In the article there is a conversation with a teen which states, “I snuck a glance at my friend's paper and copied her answers, I know it wasn't the best thing to do, but at least I ended up with a B”. The student had a chemistry test but due to her busy schedule and other work she wasn’t able to study for it so she ended up cheating on the test. This plus the fact that she said, “at least I ended up with a B”, shows how students prioritizes grades over anything and that students will go to any measure to get good grades. This is important because the reliance on getting a good grade causes kids to stay up late doing school work and over study for exams which of course cause tremendous amounts of stress, or it can cause cheating to get that good grade which has its own plethora of bad consequences. All in all, stress in teens is rising and the blame can be put on the horrible school system and way of teaching.
The rise of stress rates in teens has led to the rise in rates of more serious mental health disorders. One disorder that has seen a significant rise in cases in teens is depression. On the Mayo Clinic website it says that, “chronic stressful life situations can increase the risk of developing depression if you aren’t coping with the stress well”, and it turns out that teens are very stressed due to school. In school teachers have a curriculum to teach students so they can get good grades and ultimately pass the class. In order to teach this curriculum they have to throw loads of work on students and test them on this work, and since grades are prioritized students will go to any measure to get good grades even if it means staying up all night studying. This leads into the article “Tracking teen depression” by Christy Chapman, which talks about the causes of teen depression and how it can be fixed. The article talks about sleep and says, “Studies suggest that sleep-deprived students are three times more likely to be depressed than their well-rested colleagues. Teens function best on eight to ten hours of sleep a night, but the reality is that 90 percent of them get less than that”. This shows how many teens are sleep deprived and that this sleep deprivation can lead to depression. Also in the article “My teen is having more trouble falling asleep at night lately. How can I help?” by Anna Esparham it says, “Stress, anxiety, and worry are other common reasons for sleep problems”. This is vital because many teens don’t get enough sleep because they are stressed and a huge part of stress in teens comes from school. So if schools can change their ways and teach in a way that relieves stress then teens will become less stressed and therefore depression rates will drop. However, what is debatably more impactful and important than increased depression and stress rates in teens is how they cope with these things. There are many ways teens cope with their stress and depression but more frequently they have been coping with drugs and alcohol. This can be seen on the “Drug Use Among Youth: Facts & Statistics” page on the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics website. On this page it says “drug use among 8th graders increased 61% between 2016 and 2020” , and that “86% of teenagers know someone who smokes, drinks, or uses drugs during the school day”. This increasing trend in drug use among 8th graders directly correlates with stress because among that age group stress rates have also increased significantly. The percentage of teens that know someone who does drugs or other substances during school being that high shows how stressful school is because kids can't even go an entire school day without their coping mechanisms. In a similar fashion, this abuse of drugs and other substances to cope with hard times is a direct fear that Aldous Huxley shows in his book Brave New World. In the book, citizens of the World State take the drug soma whenever they are feeling down or sad or stressed, they have a dependence on the drug and cannot live without it. This dependence on drugs can be seen in the world today in the way that when teens become stressed they smoke or drink to relieve it instead of talking to someone. We are falling down Huxleys feared path and it can be solved but the source of the problem has to be attacked and this source is stress which is generated in schools. Everything considered, depression in teens and the ways they cope with this depression is very bad and will have serious consequences in the future if the problem isn’t addressed now, and the source of this problem is the poor schooling system.
The current school system is proven to cause stress in students and ultimately doesn’t even help kids learn, however, this can change. One way this can be done is by teachers to participate and explore project based learning. Project based learning is a teaching method in which students explore and engage in real world problems and challenges to gain knowledge and learn. The article “Creating and Sustaining Environmental Education Districtwide” by Andrea Kane discusses environmental learning which is a form of project based learning. In the article it says, “Queen Anne's students are enthusiastic in learning about the local environment by building shoreline protection projects to enhance fish habitat and oyster restoration efforts on the Chesapeake Bay”. This shows how the students are learning by engaging in problems around their community and that they are actually enjoying learning instead of being stressed. This is important because by this way of teaching proving to be successful in these schools, it can result in a change in schools across the nation to focus on project based learning. The article also mentions how the schools are able to do this learning due to “funding, time and energy of our teachers...” (Kane). This is important because these two things are the reason the standard way of teaching is not working and just creating stress. In many public schools across the country there is a lack of funding which results in poor facilities and causes the teachers to not be able to maximize teaching so they instead throw loads of work at students for them to do so they can learn the curriculum. So if public schools are able to increase their funding and get the teachers to be more involved with the students then more schools can migrate this project based learning into their system which can relieve students of stress while still learning. On the other hand, some may say project based learning is a very ineffective way of teaching. Natalie Wexler looks further into this in her article, “Why So Many Kids Struggle to Learn: TEACHERS CONTINUE TO BE TRAINED IN WAYS THAT IGNORE THE FINDINGS OF COGNITIVE SCIENCE,” the article starts off by talking about a teacher who used project based learning to teach a book but soon found the problems with this way of teaching. It states, “Kalenze realized that his students didn't know enough about the 1920s to appreciate why Gatsby was considered the Great American Novel and not just another tale of unrequited love” (Wexler). He realized that even though his students were enjoying the work and getting it done they weren’t really learning anything and understanding the topic well. This shows how based on some experiences teachers may want to stay away from project based learning and just stick to traditional stressful learning. The article goes on to talk about another way of teaching based on cognitive load theory. This is a way of teaching intended to get students to understand and hang onto information by storing this information in their long term memory. In the article it says, “The best way to get around constraints on working memory is to store lots of information in long-term memory, which has a capacity that is theoretically unlimited” (Wexler). This way of learning seems to be effective because if you can successfully store information in your long term memory then you will be able to reproduce that information at any time and it will always be with you. However, a similar form of this learning was explored in the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. In the book when the Director is taking the students through the facility they walk into a hypnopedia room and he says, “They’ll have that repeated forty or fifty times more before they wake; then again on Thursday, and again on Saturday” (Huxley 29). Hypnopedia is a way of teaching where someone listens to information repeatedly while sleeping so that information gets engraved in their minds and they never forget it. This seems pretty similar to cognitive load theory teaching because in both ways of teaching information is getting engraved in minds so that it is never forgotten. Huxley feared that this teaching method would be abused by the government so that they could poison the minds of the youth and get them to believe whatever the government wants. Due to this fear Huxley would not agree with this future path of teaching because it could lead to false information getting thrown into the minds of the new generation which can corrupt them. In the end, there are many ways teaching in America can be improved upon and some of these methods may not be as good and effective as we think.
There is no doubt that the current education system has many flaws and has a negative impact on the students. This can be seen in the rise in stress and depression rates in teens, and in teens' opinions of school. Even though some may say the school system is fine and works, the data shows that teens all around America are suffering and the main cause is school. If things don’t change in the education system now, the future of America is going to be filled with a generation of stressed, depressed, and unproductive individuals.
Works Cited
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