Why are high schoolers not flourishing?

Alex Willis
The Good Life: Spring 2024
2 min readFeb 22, 2024

Today in many schools if you were to ask a student if they are enjoying their time there, the answer will be no, but why is that? Many kids growing up enjoy school for the simple fact that they love learning and getting to stimulate their brains, but as they grow older that mindset gets flipped on its head until they hate the building they are forced to go to five times a week. One of the reasons high schoolers can’t flourish is the timing in school. Firstly, school starts incredibly early, and when students are staying up late to finish assignments they are getting on average 5–6 hours of sleep when they should be getting 8–9 around that age. Another reason I believe students are finding it hard to flourish is just how much these teens have on their plate everyday. They have six classes every day and work from those classes they need to focus on, as well as extracurricular activities and sometimes jobs on top of that, with all of that they barely have time to themselves to enjoy life, which causes them to start loathing school since it causes them so much stress. Finally, I believe the grading and standardized testing students must fulfill is the main reason they can’t flourish. Today students are more worried about getting a passing grade on a test that they cram in all the stuff they have learned, vomit it out onto the test, and then forget everything they went over. Students are not learning material because they are so focused on tests and grades, because in the school system if you make a bad grade you are a bad student. Students can’t get passionate about learning because their is nothing to get passionate about when their sole focus is how their next report card will look. All of those elements mixed with an uncomfortable room students must sit in for hours with bright flourescent lights piercing their skull and you have turned a place made to benefit these students into their worst nightmare.

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