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Totally understandable. When I was of school age (last millennium) every morning I had a stomach filled with dread. School is a miserable experience of judgem

• CoastalCoder 3y ago
  I imagine this varies from person to person. Back in the 1980's in the U.S., I found junior high (grades 7-8) pretty unpleasant, but I really enjoyed high school (grades 9-12).
• zx8080 3y ago
  What the hell are they doing to pupils at schools in the US?! I mean, literally, how are the US schools differ from the other countries ones? Please share something, as it's not clear at all for those non-US citizens.
  • V1ndaar 3y ago
    Huh, I went to school in Germany and can relate pretty well with them.
    • jamal-kumar 3y ago
      From what I understand, German school is even more demanding in terms of how they drive you to do well or lose benefits. I can only imagine the stress of things like getting demoted from Gymnasium [1] after not performing well enough due to life stresses during a critical developmental phase in life, or not making Abitur [2] qualifications and not getting that free post secondary. Well at least they aren't shooting each other I guess [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(Germany) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(Germany) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abitur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abitur
    • jazzyjackson 3y ago
      According to John Taylor Gatto, american schools are modeled after prussian military academies of the late 19th century - down to the bells dividing the day into periods. - compulsory - segregated by age - passive lecturing - strict rules and deference to authority - standardized, inflexible curriculum
      • jamal-kumar 3y ago
        He's a really good author, and I think anyone interested in this subject should definitely read him. [1] However I think that the American and German school systems definitely diverge in that they haven't defunded, devauled and destroyed the German system to a point where it's questionable why it even exists in its current form still. [1] https://www.naturalchild.org/articles/guest/john_gatto.html https://www.naturalchild.org/articles/guest/john_gatto.html
        • mschuster91 3y ago
          Oh we do have defunded our system as well - particularly the buildings are rotting. Estimates are 45 billion dollars [1], and that's just to catch up with deferred maintenance and upkeep work, not to create new school buildings to match the increased demand or new staff. Education is one of the easiest things for politicians to "save money" by cutting budgets and the consequences usually take 15-20 years to appear, at which time the responsible politicians are long gone and can't be held accountable. [1] https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/bildung/investitionsrueckstand-an-schulen-kfw-sieht-weiterhin-milliardenluecke-bei-schulsanierungen-a-721dc495-cb3b-4b4b-b654-1cec1e6c75b2 https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/bildung/investitionsruecksta...
          • jamal-kumar 3y ago
            You should have seen the one I went to. There was warning stickers on all the walls not to disturb them because they were filled with asbestos and it represented an enormous mesothelioma hazard if you like, knocked into them hard enough and breathed
        • karaterobot 3y ago
  • SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
    I can't speak to the American experience as I'm Canadian, but my whole life I've suffered, as many do, with an anxiety disorder. Whether it was worrying about having to perform in drama class (we had limited options for electives in my small town), some assignment being due, or just getting bullied on the bus because you were the weird quiet kid who just read there was always something each day to dread. If you have social anxiety just sitting in a class trying to avoid thinking about all the other people around you who could be looking at you can be enough to be overwhelming. This doesn't mean that every kid had these problems, and the article says as much, but for those who were already having a hard time I can see their conditions being further exacerbated by the constant noise now.
  • tapland 3y ago
    I've heard that Europe takes having breaks seriously
  • codeslave13 3y ago
    Its all about academic pressure where im located. Very high peer pressure in addition to the school. Basically if you arent getting atraight a’s in honors classes youre a failure. I yanked my daughter from highschool in 10th grade and let her get a ged. The panic attacks were the last straw
  • MattGaiser 3y ago
    I would be curious whether students in places like Japan, Korea, and China would also refuse to go to school if going to school didn't also have the immense social pressure and stakes behind it.
  • dmix 3y ago
    Why do you assume this is unique to the US? I had to wake up at 6am and get driven on a noisy school bus for >1hr into the countryside to go to my Catholic public school here in Canada for years. It’s normal for kids to dread that sort of commitment. Looking back though I realized my school life was much nicer and had better teachers than the awful stuff I’ve heard from my nieces/nephews today, so maybe it was worth driving for an hour instead of staying local. Not all school life is equal.
  • Silverback_VII 3y ago
    This is not a problem specific to the United States. It's everywhere and is called the Prussian education system. You can read more about the dark side of the system here: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Problem_of_Schooling https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Problem_of_Schooling especially the 100 bad habits learned at school
  • throwaway173738 3y ago
    Not GP but everyone has different stories about American public school being awful. For instance my issues with school started with having to drop from pre-algebra to remedial arithmetic in 7th grade in order to start in the gifted classes in middle school. It was a bit of a Sophie’s choice because I really belonged in the advanced math track. The kids I was around in those remedial classes sucked and some of them would bully me for knowing things. So I learned to hide how smart I was. So it’s not going to be any one thing but rather a consequence of our culture of devaluing intelligence and learning coupled with how severely under-resourced our schools are.
  • rtp4me 3y ago
    My $0.02. Probably not much different... In my opinion, it's just the "human condition". Like adults, kids want to take the least path of resistance. Since learning is difficult for some/most of us, avoiding school is the easiest path since it requires real effort. This is why parental guidance is so important for young people. Sure, some cities experience violence, some schools have odd teaching mandates, etc, but all-in-all, it's the daily grind that kids want to avoid (just like adults!). Not to mention the pressure from social media.
    • SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
      I honestly don't think it's always laziness. I liked learning growing up. But the constant pressure and dealing with terrible and awkward social interactions with a peer group that's ravenous to jump on any perceptible slip-up at a time when you're still trying to figure yourself out spoiled it for me. We want to avoid situations that are uncomfortable. I really think we have different ideas of school based upon our own experiences in it.
  • 0zemp2c 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
      Uh, millenials are turning 40. People certainly won't be flagging your comment because of the truth content.
  • falcolas 3y ago
    Here’s one potentially major difference - US students have to worry about having to use “the bucket”, and everything that implies. To be crystal clear: it implies an active school shooting is underway.
  • karaterobot 3y ago
    I'll share this: I had great teachers, enjoyed school, felt well supported, had a tight friend group, and learned a lot. I was a nerd from a fairly poor family who lived well outside of a town of about 25k people. This was in the 80s and 90s, in the U.S. I was never bullied once, never felt threatened or scared. Was anxious sometimes, certainly did not like doing homework. If I had told my parents I was too anxious to go to school, I'm pretty sure they'd have let me stay home once. If I kept doing it, they'd have found a polite way to say "tough shit, you're going to school".
  • Kon-Peki 3y ago
    > I mean, literally, how are the US schools differ from the other countries ones? Every school district is different. At the federal level, there aren't that many rules that apply across the entire US. Each state has their own rules on top of those. You've no doubt seen on the news that places like Florida and Texas are exerting a lot more control over the schools in within their states. Others are far more laissez-faire and leave many decisions to the local population. I'm in the Chicago metro, in Illinois. By default, the school systems are based on the townships created by the original land surveys done after the American revolution. The school systems are independent governments that levy taxes and do not answer to the towns and cities whose boundaries overlap them. If a city grows large enough, it is allowed (but not required) to take over the school system and make it part of the city government, meaning that the city government now dictates many aspects of how the schools are run. Chicago (and many of its larger suburbs) have done this. My own school district is a variation on that; it is a consolidation of multiple parts of multiple townships, but still mostly independent of the city. We, the voters, exert control over how the district runs. And ours is very sympathetic to anxiety issues in children. It is an excused absence to keep your child home for a "mental health day" if they need it. Kids can go to school half-time if that is better. Want to home-school your kid and just send them to science or math class? Perfectly fine. Band, orchestra, sports teams? Sure, no problem. Break up with your boyfriend or are on the outs with your group of friends and it's just too embarrassing to eat lunch all alone? We have special rooms for when that happens. But our district is very well-funded and has outstanding academics. We've got a lot of freedom to try almost anything.
• badpun 3y ago
  I dunno, for me it wasn't the worst. School was overall much nicer than a job - less demanding, less workload, much more fun coworkers, a ton of camraderie ("us against teachers"). Basically a fun, low-stakes environment.
  • SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
    This is one of those things that is going to absolutely vary between people. That seems to be coming from the perspective of someone who had a strong friend group and felt generally connected to his peers. I certainly had friends, but we were the nerds. In the 90s in my town if you liked comic books and D&D you weren't part of the cool crowd. It never felt low-stakes, every mistake or social faux pas was a way to be relentlessly made fun of.
    • devilbunny 3y ago
      Comics and D&D were never part of the cool crowd. The hard part was if you didn't have anything to balance that. I played football. I wasn't getting invited to big parties, but nobody bugged me. Even guys who were never good enough to be first string as seniors - they were part of the team. But that might just have been my school. It was pretty good about letting the drama kids be drama kids, the nerds be nerds, etc. People generally found their niche. Maybe it wasn't the one they wished they could have, but it was a place where you were accepted, and they mostly left each other alone.
      • SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
        Yeah, I didn't have proclivities towards sports and my parents didn't the money for equipment or the time to come get me from events (we were rural so you couldn't just bus home) so I couldn't find an extracurricular niche and didn't earn the respect of the school.
      • deprecative 3y ago
        Why would anyone bug you? You played Football, presumably that meant you were able to beat the shit out of most anyone who would have bugged you. That's a bullying deterrent. If you had purely intellectual interests, or physical issues in general you quite likely would not have had the same experience. It's not about niche finding so much as it's about social blending and masking.