School killed fun, and now it’s actively killing kids

By Tasia Mallombasang

School

used to be fun. If I had to be absent from school for any extended period of time when I was younger, whether it was due to a cold or a bad case of strep throat, I would beg my mom to take me to school anyway. Didn’t matter that I wouldn’t get better any faster; didn’t matter that I could get my classmates sick—I just wanted to learn. I soaked up new knowledge like a sponge. I loved learning, and many of my fellow students felt the same. We used to hate missing school simply because we hated missing the opportunity to learn. Today, we hate missing school because we’re terrified of falling behind and becoming failures.

School needs to be fun again.

Right now, school is an endless ocean slowly drowning all of its students, and it needs to stop. While I’ve been told it is an undeniable fact that we need school when we are young to support our futures better, constant academic stress makes it almost impossible to see my future. That’s how endless this ocean feels.

Bustling school hallways are no longer filled with a sea of kids ready and eager to learn. Instead, those kids are sinking, and it’s starting to show. According to the New York Times, 13 percent of adolescents reported having major depressive episodes in 2019, a 60 percent increase from 2007. Don’t let that seemingly small statistic pass you by, because it isn’t what it should be—zero percent. No one should have to experience this, let alone children who have barely experienced life. Unsurprisingly, suicide rates also jumped nearly 60 percent in about the same time period.

So many kids with so much potential will never make it out of school simply because it has stopped being fun. I’ve been on the edge of the proverbial cliff myself—many of my sleepless, tearfilled nights have been permeated with the belief that I’d be better off dead than have a B in any of my classes.

A belief like that didn’t fill my head when I was younger. School has become completely inhospitable, and it is killing kids in droves. It could be yours next.

Clearly, something isn’t working here, right? If school is so necessary for our futures, why is it cutting our futures short? Why is it no longer fun? Via the National Education Association, Denise Pope of Stanford University cites two main factors—early school start times and excessive homework. While many experts emphasize the academic benefits of homework, too much of it raises stress substantially and leads to sleep deprivation. Early school start times also contribute to chronic sleep deprivation among teens, prompting the American Academy of Pediatrics to recommend delaying the start of school to 8:30 a.m. or later.

The AAP also urges kids ages 13-18 to get eight to ten hours of sleep per night. Yet, all my friends and I are running on much less sleep than that with Mount Everests of homework to boot. Take a guess as to why. Evidently, change is in order.

“The entire education system has created a pressure cooker for students and staff,” Pope says. “Twenty years ago, when you asked teenagers about what stressed them out, you would typically first hear things like ‘my parents’ divorce,’ or ‘my Dad’s an alcoholic,’ or ‘I don’t fit in socially.’ Nowadays, it’s always about school.”

Learning can be fun, and is fun, if you’re in an environment that allows it to be so. School is no longer that. What should be a safe space to gain new knowledge and enjoy doing so has now become home to an unbearable cycle of sleep deprivation and depression. It is constant. It feels completely endless. Teens and kids cannot possibly be expected to succeed if what they need to succeed is constantly being ripped out from under them by an institution that is supposed to help them, not hurt them. Shouldn’t school become fun again, lest we let yet another kid’s life end?