Why Don't You Want to Go to School?

By Megan Robert

According to a survey conducted by The Princeton Review, over 50% of students reported feeling stressed, 25% said homework was their biggest source of stress and on average teens are spending one-third of their study time feeling nervous, anxious, or stuck. This should not come as a surprise to most students. But to older people, this may be news to them. The fact that homework and school are such a prominent part of stress in teen’s lives should be a hint to adults that something is wrong, but if that is not enough, allow me to go into deeper detail about the issues that concern me about our schools and the negative effect they have on children, specifically, the immense amount of pressure and workload placed on students, the stress of getting into and paying for college, and racial bias.

Students nowadays face a tremendous amount of pressure to do well in school. Just take a look at when The New York Times asked students how they thought they could better improve their education system. They received more than 300 responses and most of them had something to do with lessening the amount of stress placed on students and replacing it with actually teaching the students the material. Jordan Brodsky, a student in Danvers, Massachusetts responded to the prompt with “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 away something valuable from what they’ve been taught. Which, I believe, is true.

School (at least school in America) does not test your thoroughness of the subject so much as your memory. For example - using a calculator. Most of the time, students aren’t allowed to use calculators doing tests and homework. It could be considered reasonable in lower grades when students are still learning basic math, but as students progress into higher grades it doesn’t seem to make much sense. In the real world, I doubt my future employer will require me to calculate the value of 104 - 2(424)2½ + 9 by hand. And many schools also require students to memorize the periodic table. The entire reason that Dmitri Mendeleev created the table was so that scientists wouldn’t have to memorize all the elements. But making students memorize it seems a little counter-intuitive, especially since students will likely naturally end up memorizing the periodic table the more and more they use it. Requiring students to memorize just puts unnecessary pressure on them.

But it’s not just school that students have to manage, they also have a ton of extracurricular activities and homework. Most students spend about 6-7 hours per day at school, plus most teachers assign 3.5 hours of homework per day, while the society for research on child development said students spend 5 hours in structured activities per week, meaning they spend about one hour per day on extracurricular activities. If a student were to spend one hour per day eating and slept the recommended amount of time for their age (9.25 hours), they would only have about 1- 2 hours per day to do other things (which include getting a job, free time, chores, spending time with family, etc.) So you can understand why teens are so stressed about school. It’s this thing that takes up this huge part of their life, but brings no real value to it. They don’t enjoy it. School has taken everything about learning that is so wonderful and sucked it out and replaced it with facts and data. Facts and data that we forget the moment we leave school. Schools often talk about students forgetting everything they learned over the summer.

Schools want students to remember something? Then teach it to them. Teach it to them instead of just repeating information until it's stuck in their brains for however long they need it. Students are forced to spend all this time at school reading and studying and memorizing and for what? To go to more school where they can do the same thing? Which brings us to the second reason behind our education system’s failure: the stress of college.

Students nowadays are more stressed out about college than ever. But the reason behind students' stress is not why you would think. Students are not stressed so much about college itself (That’s not to say college hasn’t gotten harder - it has) but rather having to pay for college and getting a job or internship after college. Kendra Fox-Davis, president of the United States Student Association, explained it best. In an article published by the New York Times, she said, “ ‘Students are no longer able to go to college and devote themselves to this pursuit of learning and just spend four years being introspective...Instead of just ‘How do I memorize this information for this exam,’ it’s ‘How do I work enough hours or apply for enough scholarships or get enough grants so I can afford a full load of classes?’ ’ ”College and high school students now not only have to study and work but also have to think about the cost of college. The price of college has increased so much, students are forced to reevaluate their academic decisions based on their financial status.

In 1970, according to Yale Daily News, college tuition for Yale University was $2,550. Adjusting for inflation, that would mean $16,942.84 today. Today’s tuition is $57,700 for the 2020-2021 school year, not including room and board. It’s nearly 3.5 times the tuition in 1970 - and it’s only for one year. In 1970, if a person went to college at Yale University for four years and had a minimum wage job, they would have to work four hours a day for less than five years to pay off their debt. However, if a person were to go to Yale University in the same scenario today, they would have to work for nearly 22 years to pay off their debt. Also, in 1970, only 26 percent of middle-class workers had a degree beyond a high school diploma, meaning that you didn’t even really need to go to college to be able to support yourself and your family. However, nowadays “nearly 60 percent of all jobs in the US economy require a higher education.” So students don’t have the option of not going to college, and they usually can’t afford it either, so they have to rely heavily on scholarships and financial aid to pay for the college causing even more stress.

School nowadays is not as simple as just taking a test or doing your homework, there is so much more that students have to think about and so much more that is putting pressure on them from such a young age.

So, what can we do to improve our education system? What are the necessary improvements we need to make to ensure our children get the good and fair education they deserve?

For starters, we can start by eliminating the pressure place on students by teaching them to associate school with learning rather than grades. Finland, for example, has adopted this system of education. According to Smithsonian Magazine, “There are no mandated tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of the students’ senior year in high school. There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools, or regions…The result is a Finnish child has a good shot at getting the same quality education, no matter whether he or she lives in a rural village or university town.” Not to mention that there are no private schools or universities and even the small number of independent schools that exist are funded publicly and are not allowed to charge for tuition. And Finlands’ education system works - “Ninety-three percent of Finns graduate from academic or vocational high schools...yet Finland spends about 30 percent less per student than the United States.”

In addition, college in other countries is far, far, less than college in America. Most countries' average tuition is less than 10,000 per year. In Finland and Denmark, college is free for European Union citizens and in Estonia free for natives. It’s incredibly difficult for Americans to imagine not having to pay 100,000 dollars for four years of college and get a good education, but European countries have shown it’s possible. Which raises the question of what colleges are doing with that much money? But that is a discussion for another time.

The American education system has many things wrong with it. The main problem is that its priorities have shifted from providing education to enforcing meaningless rules, making money, and setting up certain groups for success and others for failure. But the only way we can ensure that future generations get the education they deserve is if we take the necessary measures to give everyone a free and fair education, like allowing students to have more time outside in higher grades and forcing colleges to lower their tuition fees. Students and teachers, parents and children, high school dropouts and college graduates must take a stand. For as Nelson Mandela said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to save the world.” And so it is up to the people with the weapon of education to change our world now so that our children might also have the opportunity to change their world in the future.