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School Stress: The Truth
In today’s modern society, people tend to underestimate and misjudge the amount of pressure pupils in school are under. The older generation in particular compare our school lives to when they were in school. This quite simply is incomparable. Many generational changes have occurred since our grandparents were at school and it is about time that this is recognised.
Nowadays, pupil’s school lives are extremely stressful. The pressure to be academically competent; be a member of clubs, the same time as having a good social life and being popular is the struggle young people face. This is unrealistic and is only a recipe for a very stressful school career. One would say “Your school years are the best years of your life” unfortunately, for most of us, this is not the case. All of the built up pressure coming from all angles of our school life can cause many mental health issues within young people. For example, in a 2016 survey for Parent Zone, “93% of teachers reported seeing increased rates of mental illness among children and teenagers”. This clearly shows the large proportion of teenagers that are suffering from mental health problems in school. This most definitely gets overlooked and very clearly more needs to be done about it. Perhaps there is a flaw in the education system or teachers need to give out less homework, or even just providing more counselling support would made a large difference. In particular, rates of depression and self-harm is on the rise in young people and I think by looking at gathered research, school is the main culprit. It is time to change this and make school a more enjoyable experience for individuals and not a stressful one. Pupils should feel excited and happy walking into school, not dreading what unnecessary pieces of work they will be given that day, and how they will balance this with their other life commitments.
This is the reality of school life in 2017, this is the truth.