I know this is gonna sound really over dramatic for everyone and all adults are gonna be like ‘well your just saying that because you are too lazy to revise’. Well guess what Karen, it isn’t just for that reason. Let me educate you with 5 Ws

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Who

These tests are being given to young people who are supposed to be ‘our future’, yet we bash them so hard that they have no confidence in themselves to do great things. I am not sure if anyone else has heard of this statistic, but the average teen has the same level of anxiety as a psych ward patient in the 1960’s. I don’t know about you but that doesn’t sound right to me. As a teen, I don’t see the point of making us prepare for the future if you make us all feel as though we wont have one if we don’t know how to work out the area of a triangle. Not only have we been affected by work but also the media which means we have so much more to worry about. I mean how much of an impact can we make if we are all depressed. Because that is how tests make us feel. Some of us don’t seem very phased my a bad grade and, although I can’t speak for all of you, we do care about it and it does affect us. Just sometimes we are scared to be smart and I know how that sounds but I think it is more of a peer pressure thing. And for the people who always do well in exams, the person who gets upset if they don’t get 90% or above. They too are struggling. They feel so stressed by revising all the time and never feeling good enough. Why do we waste our lives and our minds in order to get a big A on a piece of paper. How can we rule our whole life of of our school life. A teen, not fully understanding what they are doing in life, yet have so much pressure to make the right decisions. And for what, to get into uni, to get into debt, to get a 9 to 5 job and work for someone else until we retire and die. Is that what you call success? They say that when you are born you are only scared of 2 things, the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises. So at what point did the fear of failure, the fear of embarrassment, the fear of the future, come into play? Maybe it was from home life? But people with a good family life still have these fears, right? So what do we all share in common? School. Tests. Essays. Have all adults been brainwashed since they left school because even though we are ‘the future’, you guys are the present and you need to fix this now.

What

School is defined as ‘an institution for educating children’. That sounds all nice and appropriate. An exam is defined as ‘an official test that shows your knowledge or ability in a particular subject’. Lovely, right. Well from the looks of it yes, but I think they left something out at the end of the school definition, ‘an institution for education children in one way despite the range of learning abilities‘, and in the exam definition, ‘an official test that shows your knowledge or ability in a particular subject that will depend on their future even though it doesn’t suit everyone’s strengths and abilities and causes mental illnesses‘. Yeah that definitely sounds more accurate to me. If you look at how cars or phones have evolved, you can see such a difference. But when you look at school, the only thing different are the pupils.

The point I am trying to make here is that school were made to teach us how to work in factories. How to live in the old world. But now the world has modernized. There are so many other job opportunities other than being a house wife or a coal miner. Why is is that. We have become so much more knowledgeable about the world and how people work, yet you can’t put into play the facts that you discovered about the way everyone learns differently. The thing that is most annoying is that you put so much money towards pointless things and then give scraps to the schools. It doesn’t make any sense at all. Schools need to catch up with the rest of the world

Where

To be honest I don’t really have anything to complain about, well for me anyways. I mean I get to see my friends. I guess all I would have to say is that the schools aren’t well funded enough to get great heating and furnishing. It usually is freezing although that isn’t the same for all of us.

When

I know that school times are different in many places. In the UK it starts at 9.20 am and ends at 3.45 pm. I think that in the US they go to school at like 7 am, although I am not that sure, and I have no clue what time you get back home at. Did you know that teenagers have evolved to have different body clocks. We are wired to go to bed later and wake up later because back in the days we were not old enough to hunt but not young enough to just lie around all day so they were made to stay up late to make sure nothing was about to eat them when they were asleep. Now, I am not saying that we should move school to really late and then get out really late because that is not any better. What I think is that school in general shouldn’t be so long. 6 hours everyday just to go home, do more homework, go to bed and repeat. It is almost impossible to do well in school and have a good social life. We are either exhausted from school or we have been bombarded with homework. It always hits harder during winter as well. We go to school just as the sun is going up and then we get home when it is nearly dark. We send more of our time under florescent light rather than the sun. We spend most of the time staring out the window rather than being outside. We hardly get any fresh air because school takes up so much of our life. My spine is never happy with me because I sit on uncomfortable chairs 24/7 with a heavy schoolbag that can’t even fit all my books. How am I supposed to learn anything about the ‘real world’ if I am not even allowed into it. We go to school for the majority of months each year and although we do have breaks, 5 days a week is so exhausting. The fact that dreading Mondays is normal is not OK because we should all be excited for everyday. We should spend our short life on this earth doing what we want everyday. And the fact it happens in the younger years of our lives is so sad. From day one of school you are getting stressed for work, for grades, for classes. No 10 year old should feel that way, they should be running around outside writing stories, songs, positions.

Why

So an over all reason for why we should change the way school works and how exams play a role in our lives is because they are just so ridiculous. I really can’t put into the words the fear I have for the future generations because if it keeps going the way it is, they are all going to be mentally ill by the age of 8 or younger. How can we let this happen. These were things that we made ourselves so we didn’t always need them. Why can’t we just encourage kids to go to schools. Tell them what classes they can go to and they can make their own decision without the pressure of ‘chose wisely because this is your future’. Of course there will have to be some sort of structure but we need to adapt it to the modern world. Not everyone sits at a desk all day. Not everyone should be expected to learn hundreds of new things every day. I mean it doesn’t make sense. Why should everything ride of of an exam we did 10 years ago. We could of had a bad day and not done well in the subject that we love. We all get so scared that we wont be able to do something we are passionate about because we can’t do tests very well. You expect so much from us yet you wouldn’t be able to do it yourself. Why do we stuff our faces with utter wastes of time to just forget it all in the future. I am going to ask you some questions that I am doing in school now and, for any adults, I would like you to answer them and see if you remember anything about it. Obviously, if you are specialized in one of these areas you will know the answer but anyways. What is a surd? Label the structure of a leaf. Tell me why the poem ‘Belfast confetti’ has a full stop. What types of clouds are there, how high up are they and what do they produce or show about the weather? And finally, name all of the causes of the great depression? Well? Could you do it? Not even a bit? If you could? Would you be able to do it under pressure and in around 10-15 minutes? If you can’t, don’t worry. You aren’t dumb. Obviously you just don’t need to use these in your daily life. But I just want to show you how ridiculous some of the things we learn are. And just like us, you may have felt a bit pressured and made to feel stupid. Yes, that is how most of us feel, but on a larger scale and everyday. And the thing is that now you can go off and live your life. Nobody is going to go to you and say you are so stupid, because you don’t need to know that. They would say ‘what are you worrying about? You don’t need to know this’. Yeah, that is exactly what I am trying to get across. Why waste my time on unimportant facts instead of figuring out how to pay taxes, do an interview, buy a house? It just sounds so ridiculous and then we get told that ‘these are the best years of your life’. :0 Excuse me, I hope the fuck it’s not. If my life only gets worse from here then I haven’t got any reason to live. And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is the mindset of a teen. What do you think?

Just remember guys, hang in there because it is gonna be a bumpy ride but we got this PERIODT.

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