I remember a time when school was simply about just learning, at least that was how it looked from the outside ,yiu went to class, you read your books, you do your assignments, and hopefully you understood something new by the end of the day, but somewhere along the line, something changed, then school slowly stopped feeling like a place of learning and started looking more like a battlefield.
In some schools, the competition is so intense that the students feel like they are now constantly under pressure just to prove they are better than everyone else,see this, it is no longer about understanding a subject or developing a skill, instead, it becomes about ranking, grades, and who gets to sit at the top of the class list.
And the truth is that kind of pressure can push people to do the things that they would not do on a norms ,see I have heard stories of students taking drugs just so that they can stay awake long enough to study this one is not rumor, it happened, others survive on very little food because they are too busy trying to read and some barely sleep because every hour feels like a chance to revise one more topic before the next test.
And people that see , it might look like a really impressive, high grades, perfect results, thingy, but if you do look closely, you start to wonder what the real cost is.
Because when students are constantly pushed to the edge like this, learning automatically now stops being enjoyable,
it now becomes so stressful, It becomes really exhausting too for them, and for some persons , it becomes so overwhelming.
And truthfully not everyone can survive that level of pressure, when someone studies day and night and still does not reach the top, the disappointment can then hit really hard, instead of feeling like they simply need more time to improve, they may begin to feel like they have failed completely, and that is where things can become dangerous.
Some sudents will fall into depression because they feel like are are not doing well,others will now start to doubt their abilities ,the environment that was supposed to help them grow ends up slowly breaking their confidence
That is when I start asking the real question, is this kind of competition actually helping anyone?
Competition, itself is not a bad thing , In fact, a little bit of it can be motivating, It can encourage people to work harder and push themselves to improve, but when competition becomes the only focus, something important might not be complete.
Learning.
When students are concerned about how they want to beat their classmates than truly understanding what they are studying, the education system now becomes shallow, people start memorizing things just so to pass exams instead of truly understanding them, once the exam is over, most of that information disappears.
So what exactly was learned?
Sometimes I think the schools just forget that these students too are humans and that they are not machines that produces perfect grades, see , everyone learns at different speeds and that's good, everyone has their different strengths, and not every student is meant to compete in the same kind of way.
A healthy learning environment should challenge students, yes, but it should also support them too, It should make them curious, not being anxious.
Because at the end of the day, education is supposed to prepare these people for life itself, and not just exams.
Maybe schools don’t need less learning or less ambition, maybe what they really need is a little more balance.
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