Why is education so toxic?

School days are meant to be the “best days of your life”….. bulls**t! School for me was one of the most toxic environments I have ever experienced, and it is only from taking a break from education that I realize what a harmful environment it was.

For me, I was one of these people that wasn’t crazy clever, but I could get decent grades if I put a lot of work in. I worked very hard through the majority of school, including a large amount of work put in at home through homework and revision. The first time that I ever really noticed this was at the start of my two year GCSE biology course. I was not putting a lot of work in and in a test my grade was an E (for a top set student this was pretty bad). I had had enough of teachers thinking that I was badly behaved and lazy, did some revision, asked my teacher for help, and in the next test I got an A…. just a bit of a difference! This work ethic continued to grow in most of my subjects (I was never going to work hard in geography let’s be real here) and into my college (16-18 in the UK), to the point where I could hardly carry more than one of my eight folders at a time. And yet all this work and it never really seemed to be appreciated. Teachers would always favouritise those who got the good grades in our class. Those who had a horrible attitude towards other people, and were so egocentric. But this didn’t matter. They got good grades and that was clearly all that mattered. I spent years being compared to these people. Being made to feel that I wasn’t good enough because I didn’t get as high grades. It didn’t matter the fact that I was going home and revising in pretty much any free time I got. It didn’t matter that I volunteered at least once a week, raised just under £800 for a charity doing a skydive and much more helping with cake sales and other events around school. It didn’t matter that I was constantly doing extra curricular activities and helping out at any opportunity I was given. What mattered was I wasn’t clever.

In English for a bit, I sat next to this boy that has now gone to Cambridge uni. His dad is a professor of maths and yeah, it’s fair to say that this guy is pretty clever. He was always the “golden child” of the class and in all my lessons with him, it pretty much was made clear that there was an expectation that we should be more like him. In one English lesson, he was talking to his mate (also clever) about the class in our year that contained many special needs students, in particular one girl in this class. In this conversation he was constantly mocking this girl, saying how he can’t imagine what it would be like to be stuck in a class of people “that stupid”. I was in shock. There’s this guy who is crazy clever and I am expected to act more like, and yet he says statements like this. Surely if you are that clever you would want to use that ability to help others, right??? Clearly not. I have heard many comments like this from his friendship group, including somebody telling me approximately 2 hours before some important exam results that he was confident about his results after hearing my answers. But these personalities are celebrated, because the people behind them have the ability to get the top grades, even if there was no work put in in order to achieve them. For someone who struggles with self esteem and believing in themselves, this constant comparison really hit me, and it seemed like a constant battle to get teachers to see my potential, even though in many cases this never really happened.

Teachers have really treated me like dirt before. My headteacher tried to kick me out of all of my lessons because I was fainting due to PTSD. I had a teacher who would give me a detention every lesson no matter what- I literally got a detention for not doing enough work in a lesson where I fainted for 20 minutes and ended up being taken in an ambulance to A&E. This same teacher told me to “get over” my late brothers death and when reporting this to the support department at my school, I was told there was nothing they could do about it. My house leader was constantly having a go at me (and many other people), never thanking me for the multiple things I did for the house, and never liking me because I wasn’t afraid to have an opinion that was different than hers on certain topics. I’ve definitely had my share of teachers treating me awfully and yet I am expected to respect them because of their job. If you want my respect then you better earn it. i found it so unfair that I would have to treat these people who treated me so badly with respect, or face the consequences that followed. This would never be accepted in a working environment, so why is it okay in an education environment, where the students and teachers alike are there to work? If teachers worked towards seeing the potential in the students talents and their personalities, maybe the kids that they teach would feel a lot better about themselves and education would be a lot more positive experience.

And then we have exams. Exams were slowly killing me off. When I started college, the government decided to make both GCSEs and A-levels harder. A-levels are already a jump from GCSE and going from the easier GCSEs to the harder A-levels was an extremely difficult process. The first year exams no longer counted towards final grades. I had no coursework, and a ridiculous amount of stuff to learn and understand for my exams. Two years worth of work came down to 9 exams. This amount of stress was actually ridiculous to the point where it started having physical effects on my body. I know I struggled more than the average person as I was fighting mental illness at the same time ;however , I was so stressed that my hair started falling out in pretty big clumps. We would have to unblock the shower almost every time after I used it as so much was coming out. This was extremely scary, and I don’t think it should ever get to the point where your body is going through so much stress for the sake of some exams.

All my way through education, I was lead to believe that education was the most important thing. I used to want to be a teacher and my whole life was focused around education. I never took the time to step back and find who I was as a person before and what I want from life. I started nursery at 18 months and then primary school when I was for. From 4-18 I was in education. 14 years of being brainwashed. 14 years of people trying to shape and form me into somebody that I am not. And only now after taking a break do I see how much manipulation I was under. I do realize that not everyone has this experience of education, but rates of mental illness in schools are reaching higher levels than ever. Something has got to change before the next generation is so debilitated by their experience of school that they can not reach their full potential.

Thanks for reading!!
Zoe x