It’s no secret nowadays that there is immense pressure on students to succeed academically. Whether you’d like to admit it or not, children and teens all the way up to young adults don’t have it easy.
“In our time things were much more difficult. We weren’t spoonfed and spoilt like you kids!”
From the moment you step into a primary school till the day you start your 9-5, students are suffocated with information, rules, expectations and bucketloads of stress. We can argue all day about the pros and the cons of the education system and get nowhere, but the fact of the matter is that the stress levels on students as young as 9 years old has shot up to very intense levels.
Students are being force fed a lot of academic content, and parents and teachers have very high expectations regarding students’ performance. At younger ages especially, but also visible in sixth form and university levels, school outshines everything else in a student’s life. Conversations between adults and children is most commonly about school. Adults don’t really find much else to speak about with children, which has an adverse effect on children. If role models only ever talk to you about school, then it must be the only important thing in life, and for a student who is struggling academically, it can very easily make them feel disappointed in themselves, as though they are not good enough.
These effects can mostly be seen in the teenage years, but can easily be seen in younger children, especially those with strict parents who enforce academic performance in harsh ways. This overshadowing effect that education has doesn’t leave room for other areas of life such as sports, arts and social life, which are all equally as important. A student who excels in sports might feel a sense of worthlessness because he isn’t as good in school, even though his talents might obviously lie elsewhere.
As you can imagine, this relates a lot to mental health problems. Mental disorders in children and teens are on the rise.
Approximately 3% of children between 6 and 12 and 8% of teens may have serious depression, and it is estimated that 80% of children with anxiety disorders and 60% of children with depression are NOT getting the treatment they need. These staggering statistics should be more than enough to reevaluate both the education system and the way we bring up our children. Naturally, the stigma that still surrounds mental health plays a role in this problem also, with many parents ignoring symptoms their child might be exhibiting, and children not having adequate knowledge about mental health issues that they, or their peers may be experiencing. Instead, they are overwhelmed with other academic information and not taught how to properly deal with the stresses of life.
Maybe children are lazy or spoilt, and the phenomenon of ‘student apathy’ is a very real problem we are facing, but in classic modern-day fashion, it is simply easier to label a student as ‘lazy’ than the education system as ‘broken’.
We are raised in a society where you are told that you are special, but made to conform, and as we all know, actions speak louder than words. At the end of the day, it is not a 12 year-old’s responsibility to get a good education, it is the responsibility of the parents and the educators to provide students with the knowledge, skills and support to excel in the best ways they can. It is time to promote a healthier, stronger and more open minded education system for children in the hopes that they will grow up to be free thinking, outspoken and hardworking.
