The American School System

Hi. I'm a highschool student, currently a freshman. I'm only one year in and I already hate it. My hate for this emotionally traumatizing rollercoaster sparked the motivation to write this for anyone reading. If you're in school and you hate it, show this to your parents. You probably feel the same way and maybe you have the same experiences. Anyway, let's get into this.

First things first, the system in general. Schools are systematically hellish. From the sexism and racism, to the overwhelming workload that's pushed onto students. To all the parents out there, we're trying our best. I promise that. But we're still just kids, and the thing about school is that they don't give much positive feedback. We're starved of the positivity. Sometimes the teachers are part of the problem, with them sometimes being mean, racist, sexist, the list could go on. A geometry teacher got fired from my school for being a pedophile, another for not doing her job. That's just my school though. Many other schools have worse, like the UK school who threatened legal action against a 12 year old Muslim girl for her skirt being too long. You can read more about that here.

Secondly, I want to talk about the outrageous, sexist uniforms the schools enforce. At my school, we have to wear polo shirts that are solid, school colors tucked into pants with a belt. The pants can only be navy blue, black or khaki, and can't be jeans or leggings. They've made some exceptions, like we can wear hoodies, but they still have to be school colors. We can't dye our hair or have certain piercings either. It's ridiculous to me because they preach being ourselves but they go and do shit like that. If we break those rules? ISS, no questions asked. I think they abuse ISS but the uniforms shouldn't be so restricting in the first place. It makes us uncomfortable and we can't learn and process things while we're uncomfortable. They only promote conformity and not personality.

This might seem weird, but eight hours a day is too much. Our brains need rest to digest, sort and draw conclusions from information, and they do that while we're asleep or during free time. However, with pounds of homework every night we don't have time enough to process new information, which is why we have to learn the same general information every year. Homework was invented as a punishment and should stay in the past. It doesn't help with anything and kids shouldn't have to take school home into their free time. In Finland, their school days are from 8-9 am to 1-2 pm and each class is 45 minutes. They have the best education system in the world along with Denmark and South Korea.

Finally, I wanna say something about the power and control thing. Fun fact: the guy who invented school had a fetish for power and control. But anyway, the system is designed to make us feel powerless, small, humiliated and the like. All they want to do is control us, so they enforce these bs rules and when we don't follow them, they punish us greatly. We're not there to learn information, we're there to learn our place.

Now, I've never taught a class, but the same thing can be said about the people who enforce and make these rules. These rules are dated and flat out stupid. I hope whoever's reading this also wants to make a change.