I believe that school hurts teenagers. I personally do not like school. I never use to think this way, though. I actually use to like school when I was younger, but as I got older it changed a lot. It gets 2 times more stressful. It causes adults to put loads of pressure on you so you feel like you’re useless. It gets you thinking ‘why do we have to do school anyway?’ ‘What is the point?’ Adults may call me a confused teenager, but I have evidence to back up of my reasons.

Let’s start off with my first reason: Stress. School puts so much stress on a student to the point where they would rather not do it anymore. It makes us change our whole thoughts about school. All we want to do is learn new things and not have compulsory tests on everything. We love learning new things and reading new books, but when it gets to the point where you’re crying your eyes out over exams it takes the fun out of everything, you know? If you care about your grades and don’t want to be a failure in life, or at least that’s how we feel, then you feel the need to pass school. You feel the need to do anything you can to get a passing grade. It changes everyone’s view on you when you get a certain grade, especially parents.

Parents, family members, and even teachers can make you feel useless. They say many things that can get inside your mind and mess you up. They tell you “I know you can do better than this” even if you are trying your hardest. You could’ve put all the effort you had left in an assignment and they still probably wouldn’t accept it if it was lower than they wanted it to be. You keep pushing and pushing yourself to do better so your parents are proud of you. You get angry at yourself for having one point under a B. You feel like if you don’t pass with a certain grade, your family will no longer care for you. It gets you thinking ‘If I quit school, would everyone hate me?’

In the mind of a teenager, there are many things going on, especially in school. Yes, sometimes we think about food or the person across the room or simple things in that category, but most of the time it is way more complicated than that. Every time we get a question wrong on a test or a quiz we think ‘No, I probably failed. My parents aren’t going to like that’. Every time we don’t understand something we think ‘Oh no. The teacher is going to have a conference with my parents about this’. All our thoughts evolve around our parents because we are only trying to please them. We want to make them happy instead of ourselves. If they’re happy, that’s all that matters. It makes things easier in our lives because we don’t have to deal with the constant pressure of knowing our parents or family will never look as us the same because we passed the school year with a D when we tried our hardest.

Stress and pressure are what makes us students feel useless. The stress is caused by the school and the parents and the pressure is caused mostly by parents. We don’t want to let anyone down, including our teachers, so we lose sleep just to make it better. I believe some students have bad behavior because they know they’ll never be able to pass with the grade their parents want, so why try? You should know something is wrong with school when we have 2 months for summer break every year and we are still tired of going back. It’s come to the point where adults can’t just blame it on us being lazy. Have you ever thought that maybe it isn’t us, but it is the teachers who don’t care? It’s the teachers who don’t care if we pass or fail, the teachers who give us a test and if we fail, it’s automatically our fault because we didn’t study. Maybe we tried our best on that test, but the teachers were the ones who didn’t teach it correctly. They are the ones who didn’t explain clearly. Also, the students are always treating other students in a poor way and judge one another. Students only care about each other if something tragic happens. Nothing good ever happens in school. We don’t hate school because we’re lazy, we hate school because it is a terrible environment with judgmental people. Why would you want to go somewhere and do activities every single day if it makes you feel miserable? You may not listen to me, but I am pretty sure if you asked other students about this, they would most likely feel the same way.