The Reasons Why School is Bad for Children, and What Changes Should Be Made

Your few years at school defines the quality of majority of your life. Because of the fact that throughout a lot of your school years, you are still a child and maturing, some don’t really understand the concept of school and don’t prioritise their education. We learn and we grow and become more intelligent as we get older, but we start education at the age of 5 years old. How is this fair? Your qualifications in school shouldn’t determine your capability to do a job, and changes need to be made. To begin with, the education system has a negative effect on society. Suicide is the third leading cause of death for people above the age of ten and is said that school is the biggest reason causing this. Some teenager’s mind-sets are that if they fail their exams that they will have no chance of getting employed and therefor this puts an immense and unhealthy amount of pressure on teens to do well in school which can lead to mental health issues like anxiety and depression. On top of that, things like GCSEs are slowly becoming more complex as the years go on, meaning that the amount of people that are experiencing mental health issues within school is just going to increase as more pressure is being piled up onto students unless a drastic change is made within education or a new and more functional system is introduced.

A change that could be made is subjects being introduced that are catered to the students chosen career choice and subjects that teach them how to handle the responsibilities that are put on them straight after leaving school. It wouldn't be realistic to get subjects covering every type of career possible, but a good place to start would be subjects that cover a few of the most popular career paths. This would be more ideal is because in school I believe that students don't give full effort into subjects and don’t achieve the results that they are more than capable of achieving as they don't understand why they're doing the subject and how they benefit from it after they leave school. If subjects were introduced for specific career types I think it would give the students incentive to give more effort as they know that from sitting that subject they are benefiting from it and getting a better understanding of their career choice. I don't think the school system should be discarded as a whole, but I do think a massive change has to occur to fix the errors that school creates. There is also a funding gap in schools which depend on the area where the school is located in, which is unfair as it gives students attending a school with higher funding a higher quality of education leaving other students at a disadvantage as they will be receiving a poorer quality of education just because of the location of the school, and the schools that are in need of better funding are the ones receiving the least amount of money which could easily be changed.

Another action that needs to take place within Schools is that they need to look closer into the character of the person that they are employing as they play a huge role in ensuring the student is successful in the subject that they are sitting. I believe that this action needs to take place as a small portion of teachers are not passionate about teaching or ensuring the student is doing good, which could impact the results the student gets negatively. Councils could reduce the amount they spend on housing schemes and prioritise funding towards school. Factors that have a bad effect on students are things like the time school starts and the age you actually start your school career. Evidence that things like age and the time school starts are negative is shown by Finland who are consistently ranked at number 1 internationally for the education system. The reason being for this, is very likely that they start school at the age of 7 when that child is more developed and will be more capable of learning and focusing, unlike other countries such as America and UK that start education at the age of 5 when children are still too young to function and take in information properly. Students in Finland start school at 9:45 as they believe that the students need good quality sleep because if they didn’t they wouldn’t function as well as they could. Also in Finland there methods of providing a more successful education includes giving the students the same teacher throughout their time in school, which is more effective as it gives the teacher time to get a better understanding of the learning style each individual student has and creates a bond between the teachers and the pupils which makes teaching easier.

NASA is one of the most intelligence-driven companies to date, and according to NASA the education system has a very negative impact on our brains. They conducted a study and found out that 98% of children fell under the Genius Category of Imagination. This was before these children were introduced into the school system. NASA carried out the same study on the same children 5 years after they started school. The percentage dropped from 98% to 30% and then decreased again when the study was done to 12%. So we believe that when we go to school we’re learning and becoming more intelligent, when in reality throughout our school years we could actually be negatively impacting our brain. The methods of teaching should be taken into account. Funding in certain areas should be improved and other countries should take influence from Finland's success in education, and should make tweaks to their faults so education can be at the best it can possibly be.