5 ms·

Stress at schools? I hail from India and when I was a kid in 90s, I carry 10Kg bag to school and has to do homework in 7 subjects, and get beaten by stick if I

Stress at schools? I hail from India and when I was a kid in 90s, I carry 10Kg bag to school and has to do homework in 7 subjects, and get beaten by stick if I fail to do any of them separately by respective teachers, and has to spend time till 10pm after school (ends at 5 pm) at tuition to finish the homework. My view on social media and parents giving smartphones to kids is the primary reason. When kids start overusing phones and digital world, everything seems binary, they can feel like they can control people in real-world as if thy do a 3d character in their latest game. And can get depressed when others don't behave as they intend to. A friend becomes a removable entity in a list or circle(google+) they can add or pluck out anytime, without considering the emotional factor others feel. I can talk on this topic whole day, i believe kids don'e need smartphones etc. and I will never bring my kids near them at-least till they reach their teen years.

Kaiyou 7y ago
Stress is very different from physical things, like carrying heavy stuff or getting beaten. Pain, you just have to endure once and then it will slowly go away until the next time you receive pain. Stress accumulates. Forever. Getting stronger and stronger over time. If you can't deal with it it will devour you.
sandworm101 7y ago
The stress in the US system is very different. Indian schools (basically the oldschool british system I grew up with in boarding school) are hard but not stressful. Performance metrics are clear and students know what they have to do. US schools have become strange minefields of nebulous collage prep. Grades are given, everyone gets As. So students are forced to pad their resumes is other ways. You don't see indian students picking sports based on whether they can make team captain. You don't see average Indian students participating in 4+ team sports during a given week. I've talked to Canadian kids who, when caught using steroids, have said that their performance on the field was part of their entrance plan. They had consciously decided to take drugs not to become pro athletes, or even to win a scholarship, but simply to get into a proper university. Similarly, I haven't heard of many indian students taking "learning drugs". I heard an ivy league admissions person talk about the sports thing. She spoke of a boarderline case involving an athlete who had competed at the Olympics. He had failed to medal. THAT was part of the schools decision, whether they metaled or not actually mattered.
- mrfredward 7y ago
  I rarely see others mention it but I have a pet theory that grade inflation makes school more stressful. When A's are expected, a single bad day can easily sink a semester of effort. Additionally, as you say, grades don't leave much room for students to distinguish themselves positively anymore. Student have little room to excel, but every day is a chance to screw up.
  - dgabriel 7y ago
    My son is a junior now in a very competitive high school, and they had to do away with valedictorian/salutatorian because the difference between that and, say, just top 5% would be a 99.6 vs a 99.4 in one class in the 10th grade. It was so stressful for these kids, like it even fucking matters long term.
    - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
      The narrative is that it does matter long term- it supposedly defines which college you get into.
      - dgabriel 7y ago
        Even that is only important a little bit. Excelling at a mid-tier university is completely FINE. It's so much harder to get into an Ivy League school now than when I was applying in the 90s; I'm not pushing my child to the brink for a tiny blink of undergrad prestige.
      - AlexandrB 7y ago
        How much does getting into the right college matter though? I'm not sure about the US system, but in Canada it doesn't feel like it matters all that much. Some schools are a little bit better than others, but it doesn't feel like a world of difference (at least when it comes to STEM). I've especially noticed this when interviewing candidates from various schools.
        7y ago
derefr 7y ago
> I carry 10Kg bag to school and has to do homework in 7 subjects, and get beaten by stick if I fail to do any of them separately by respective teachers, and has to spend time till 10pm after school (ends at 5 pm) at tuition to finish the homework. That sounds more like pain, not stress. If you (or the you at the time, which is an important difference) can easily externalize your problem—i.e. blame the school for being stupidly strict, rather than blame yourself for not living up to its standard—then as much as it might be an ordeal to go through, it won’t really affect your psyche. The concern here isn’t that school is harder; the concern is that school (and the way parents talk to children about school) is being treated with more seriousness than it deserves, and so the potential of failure at school is being seen—at least on average—as more of a personal, moral failing, an automatic source of shame. Of course, children always treated some school environments this way—mostly high-cost private schools, intensely-competitive academic schools, and military academies. But this attitude seems to be spreading to all schools, and that’s a bit concerning.
- naasking 7y ago
  Pain and fear of pain is stressful. I think people are trying too hard to dismiss the perfectly reasonable point that schooling used to be stressful in a different way, became more reasonable as we moved away from corporal punishment, but is now becoming too stressful again, just in a different way.
- ryandrake 7y ago
  Competition is way up now because the stakes are so high. When I was a kid, there was a spectrum of success: people who did well in school and went to college did well as adults, people who did a little well were a little successful, people who did average had average adult lives, etc. We are moving toward a bimodal winner-take-most world. Straight A’s plus good university in the right major and you’re set for life, but come up short in any way and you’re going to end up on welfare or homeless. That’s the message my fellow parents are telling their kids (I’ve heard it in person), and that pressure is the norm. The Middle Class bus only has a few seats left, and you need to do everything at 150% intensity during school to get a ticket.
viklove 7y ago
> they can feel like they can control people in real-world as if thy do a 3d character in their latest game It's actually hilarious to me that you think this could possibly be true.
- close04 7y ago
  Anecdata. I personally know a person mid-30s that truly thinks life is exactly what you can see in the series Friends [0]. With almost all the unrealistic expectations promoted by scenes in that series. And that person sees any deviation from that as a failure in life. And to be clear, we're talking about an educated person with a relatively successful life. But the expectation that real life follows "Hollywood" is still there. I started to doubt that everybody is able to draw a clear line between reality and fiction as long as they bask in that fiction for too long or at key moments in life. [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108778/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108778/
  - badpun 7y ago
    What? I could very much see someone having that expectation at 20, maybe even at 25. At 30, we're already talking about a serious lagging in somebody's development as an adult (unless that someone was in jail/hospital the whole time and knows society only from TV etc.). At 35, I don't even know where to begin.
dmos62 7y ago
Your generation is teaching the current generation, so there might be an feedback/reinforcement effect, where the same ideology has worsening effects with each generation. Maybe our academic/educational culture is worse now than it was a bit earlier, because we've had more time to exercise it.
radcon 7y ago
> Stress at schools? I hail from India and when I was a kid in 90s, I carry 10Kg bag to school and has to do homework in 7 subjects, and get beaten by stick if I fail to do any of them separately by respective teachers, and has to spend time till 10pm after school (ends at 5 pm) at tuition to finish the homework. One person's suffering doesn't diminish or invalidate the suffering of someone else.
Avshalom 7y ago
And a brief search suggests India has something between an extremely high and the highest rate of youth suicide in the world...
fwip 7y ago
I can tell you don't know any kids if you think they're using G+.

Kaiyou 7y ago

Stress is very different from physical things, like carrying heavy stuff or getting beaten. Pain, you just have to endure once and then it will slowly go away until the next time you receive pain. Stress accumulates. Forever. Getting stronger and stronger over time. If you can't deal with it it will devour you.

sandworm101 7y ago

The stress in the US system is very different. Indian schools (basically the oldschool british system I grew up with in boarding school) are hard but not stressful. Performance metrics are clear and students know what they have to do. US schools have become strange minefields of nebulous collage prep. Grades are given, everyone gets As. So students are forced to pad their resumes is other ways. You don't see indian students picking sports based on whether they can make team captain. You don't see average Indian students participating in 4+ team sports during a given week. I've talked to Canadian kids who, when caught using steroids, have said that their performance on the field was part of their entrance plan. They had consciously decided to take drugs not to become pro athletes, or even to win a scholarship, but simply to get into a proper university. Similarly, I haven't heard of many indian students taking "learning drugs". I heard an ivy league admissions person talk about the sports thing. She spoke of a boarderline case involving an athlete who had competed at the Olympics. He had failed to medal. THAT was part of the schools decision, whether they metaled or not actually mattered.

mrfredward 7y ago
I rarely see others mention it but I have a pet theory that grade inflation makes school more stressful. When A's are expected, a single bad day can easily sink a semester of effort. Additionally, as you say, grades don't leave much room for students to distinguish themselves positively anymore. Student have little room to excel, but every day is a chance to screw up.
- dgabriel 7y ago
  My son is a junior now in a very competitive high school, and they had to do away with valedictorian/salutatorian because the difference between that and, say, just top 5% would be a 99.6 vs a 99.4 in one class in the 10th grade. It was so stressful for these kids, like it even fucking matters long term.
  - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
    The narrative is that it does matter long term- it supposedly defines which college you get into.
    - dgabriel 7y ago
      Even that is only important a little bit. Excelling at a mid-tier university is completely FINE. It's so much harder to get into an Ivy League school now than when I was applying in the 90s; I'm not pushing my child to the brink for a tiny blink of undergrad prestige.
    - AlexandrB 7y ago
      How much does getting into the right college matter though? I'm not sure about the US system, but in Canada it doesn't feel like it matters all that much. Some schools are a little bit better than others, but it doesn't feel like a world of difference (at least when it comes to STEM). I've especially noticed this when interviewing candidates from various schools.
      - 7y ago

derefr 7y ago

> I carry 10Kg bag to school and has to do homework in 7 subjects, and get beaten by stick if I fail to do any of them separately by respective teachers, and has to spend time till 10pm after school (ends at 5 pm) at tuition to finish the homework. That sounds more like pain, not stress. If you (or the you at the time, which is an important difference) can easily externalize your problem—i.e. blame the school for being stupidly strict, rather than blame yourself for not living up to its standard—then as much as it might be an ordeal to go through, it won’t really affect your psyche. The concern here isn’t that school is harder; the concern is that school (and the way parents talk to children about school) is being treated with more seriousness than it deserves, and so the potential of failure at school is being seen—at least on average—as more of a personal, moral failing, an automatic source of shame. Of course, children always treated some school environments this way—mostly high-cost private schools, intensely-competitive academic schools, and military academies. But this attitude seems to be spreading to all schools, and that’s a bit concerning.

naasking 7y ago
Pain and fear of pain is stressful. I think people are trying too hard to dismiss the perfectly reasonable point that schooling used to be stressful in a different way, became more reasonable as we moved away from corporal punishment, but is now becoming too stressful again, just in a different way.
ryandrake 7y ago
Competition is way up now because the stakes are so high. When I was a kid, there was a spectrum of success: people who did well in school and went to college did well as adults, people who did a little well were a little successful, people who did average had average adult lives, etc. We are moving toward a bimodal winner-take-most world. Straight A’s plus good university in the right major and you’re set for life, but come up short in any way and you’re going to end up on welfare or homeless. That’s the message my fellow parents are telling their kids (I’ve heard it in person), and that pressure is the norm. The Middle Class bus only has a few seats left, and you need to do everything at 150% intensity during school to get a ticket.

viklove 7y ago

> they can feel like they can control people in real-world as if thy do a 3d character in their latest game It's actually hilarious to me that you think this could possibly be true.

close04 7y ago
Anecdata. I personally know a person mid-30s that truly thinks life is exactly what you can see in the series Friends [0]. With almost all the unrealistic expectations promoted by scenes in that series. And that person sees any deviation from that as a failure in life. And to be clear, we're talking about an educated person with a relatively successful life. But the expectation that real life follows "Hollywood" is still there. I started to doubt that everybody is able to draw a clear line between reality and fiction as long as they bask in that fiction for too long or at key moments in life. [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108778/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108778/
- badpun 7y ago
  What? I could very much see someone having that expectation at 20, maybe even at 25. At 30, we're already talking about a serious lagging in somebody's development as an adult (unless that someone was in jail/hospital the whole time and knows society only from TV etc.). At 35, I don't even know where to begin.

dmos62 7y ago

Your generation is teaching the current generation, so there might be an feedback/reinforcement effect, where the same ideology has worsening effects with each generation. Maybe our academic/educational culture is worse now than it was a bit earlier, because we've had more time to exercise it.

radcon 7y ago

> Stress at schools? I hail from India and when I was a kid in 90s, I carry 10Kg bag to school and has to do homework in 7 subjects, and get beaten by stick if I fail to do any of them separately by respective teachers, and has to spend time till 10pm after school (ends at 5 pm) at tuition to finish the homework. One person's suffering doesn't diminish or invalidate the suffering of someone else.

Avshalom 7y ago

And a brief search suggests India has something between an extremely high and the highest rate of youth suicide in the world...

fwip 7y ago

I can tell you don't know any kids if you think they're using G+.