As Sir Ken Robinson said, “humans are born with creativity, but we are educated out of it”. Now some of you might find the idea quite laughable, however, this is a common idea between students, educators, and educational and developmental scientists. In schools of the modern day, a prevelant term for the system education is “teach for the test”. And now that students are speaking up about it, the majority seems to be worn out of the system.
According to the study done by the Yale Child Study Centre found that 79.8% of students feel “bored”, 58% feel “tired” and 69.51% feel “stressed” during school hours. The least reported feelings on the survey were “interested” and “curious”. And another study done on the effects of mental health on learning reported that 30% of students dealth with suicidal thoughts, 10.3% have been hospitalized, 8.8% have attempted suicide, and 32.8% have been on medicaiton for mental health disorders between the years on 2012 and 2013. Another study done on U.S. college students reported that 41% of students have been diagnosed for clinical depression, and that 22% of those cases were concluded to be cases of severe clinical depression. Another study done on middle schoolers reported that 21.6% of students were smoking ciggarettes on a regular basis, 30.9% had been binge drinking over the past 2 weeks, 39.9% had used marijuana in their lifetime, and that 13.2% had used cocaine in their lifetime. The most common grade for these actions was found to be 7th grade. I want to remind you that in 7th grade, the children are between 12 and 13 years of age. Other studies, which I will not bore you with the statistics of, have shown that these numbers double by the time the students enter highschool.
Do we really want these numbers to be true? Do they not seem like fever dreams, almost as if they are lies? But the sad truth is that they are far from lies, they are the truth which parents and politicians do not want to accept, and disregard. The saddest part of all this, is that students report most of their mental health issues to be caused by the academic stress they carry because of the schools. But what can be done about all this, and is anything being done at all?
Sadly, although some schools have adapted prevention-based systems, these seem to be hardly productive on issues such as depression, anxiety, and self harm. And out-of-school counselling on teens have only been proved to be 15-20% effective (based on region). However, reducing workload of students has proved to be the most effective method of helping them, as there was hardly any negative impact on the student’s academic success, and a sharp increase was found in the senses of fufillment in students, and there was a sharp decline in the cases of clinical depression related to school.
The education system has overworked us students to a point where there is only getting better from now, even by reducing the so called “effective methods of education” such as unnecesary amounts of homework and unmanagable schedules. This has led students to stop creating, and imagining, as their only goal in life is to get high grades and get into good colleges. Hardly any of the students nowdays are working on developing new and unseen projects, and most are working on perfecting their grades. This is counted to be the main reason for the decrease in student’s creativity and original ideas.
The conclusion we have come to from all of this, is that not only does school take away the creativity in the bright minds of students, but it also contaminates those minds with depression and anxiety.