Depressed Students

America’s Depressed, Stressed, Oppressed Kids “83% of teens said that school was ‘a somewhat or significant source of stress,’” (Shapiro). School is known for stressing students out. For years, American students have been complaining about the piles of stress school puts upon them. From excessive homework to unnecessary information, most of the criteria taught won’t be carried into the following year. Students are unsatisfied with their education system, which remains stiff, creating overwhelming tension. This leads to mental illnesses, such as depression and anxiety, and less sleep for the majority of students. America’s increasingly difficult education and fast paced education is causing mental issues for students, leading to sleep deprivation

Correspondingly, when American public schools are compared to the rest of the world, they are one of the best schools that “...strive to create well-rounded graduates and not just good test-takers”(Singer). In this case, American education is so good that they focus on making students more than kids who just want to pass a class but graduates are educated and well rounded. However, schools are focused on making students smarter in order for them to pass college, stressing out them uselessly. As a matter of fact, a professor of education at the University of Derby in England believes that education should be changed and states, “Education is different from skills-based training, and all the talk of “learning objectives” means that education is now something with specific and determined ends – making it no longer differentiated from training” (Hayes). Likewise, school stresses students out with heavy work, dumbing it down for students to only master a certain topic in order to graduate. School trains students to pass college and to survive in the real world with skills that can be used for jobs and getting money, not for making students learn, become wise, be and feel happy. Additionally, 17 year old Eddy Zhong, developer of Leangap, a program that helps high schoolers start companies worldwide, performs a TED talk on how he became successful at a young age and says, “And while school can make you more academically intelligent, it can teach you physics, algebra, calculus, it is diminishing the children’s creative intelligence. It is teaching them to think in a certain way, to go down a certain path in life, it’s telling them: go to high school, get a diploma, go to a good college, find a stable job, and if you don’t do that, you won’t be successful. And if that was true, how am I even standing