Comment by quacked | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quacked | Hacker News Reader

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A lot of people talk about bullying, which is definitely a possible factor, but I don't think adults remember what it was like to be in school. Unless you don't care about it and ignore your future plans, school invades every part of your senses and monopolizes all of your time. Any new information you intake is sized up for difficulty and likelihood that you'll recall it on a rest. If you fall behind one or two weeks on homework and screw up an exam you can end up an entire grade lower. Then there's the constant attention of people who don't really care about you that you're exposed to all day, whose apathy can be just as damaging as their interest.

Online school just wasn't real. Everyone I've talked to said they put in a fraction of the effort required to pass classes online that they did in person, and many people said they had grades practically forgiven.

I didn't have too hard of a time in school but I still remember it as immensely stressful, and for little reason. It is easy for someone with a real problem (drugs, bad relationship, abuse, trauma) to spend a few weeks marinating in cortisol as a result of the panopticon of in-person school to become convinced that suicide is the only way out of their negative feelings.

You’re not alone. I was severely stressed in the K-12 system. Problematic child. When they wanted to put me in the special education class, my parents took me out, dropped the Ritalin and just helped me pass the standardized tests. We used even courses over the internet to help! This was in the late 90s. Suddenly I didn’t have any “autism” anymore, got into college at 14 and I’m now a thriving adult with a family and rich social life. Of course a lot of people seem OK, but for enough of us, it isn’t. I remember how I felt and I -can- envision having commit suicide if I had gone to high school.

I failed out of 3rd grade and was put in a private school focused around learning disability. This was in the 80s, so before Ritalin. Turned out I was just bored, and could actually do academic work easily. I totally would have loved to have gone to college at 14, high school wasn’t worth it or very educational.

I genuinely wish that was how my parents had reacted to my bullying. It’s definitely what I’d plan if I was going to have kids. (And I won’t)

This. I attempted suicide when I was middle school-aged. While I'm sure puberty and social issues had a lot to do with it, it was mainly because school was bad and hard (I went to a public "gifted" magnet school) and all you heard from adults is that high school is even harder, college is harder than that, and "real life" in the workforce is even harder than that. Based on this faulty intel, I assumed that suicide was rational: if I was miserable now, I would be miserable for at least 40 years (until retirement).

It turns out that "real life" is way lower stakes than I was led to believe (at least if you have solidly upper middle class parents like I did). Even poorly-paid jobs are livable if you have low expectations, live somewhere cheap, and don't have children. Rent gets even cheaper relatively if you have a partner with a job. Unemployment insurance and medicaid are an inadequate safety net but they do exist and can get you through a rough spot.

My high school experience was different in that it wasn’t very challenging; I was shocked in university when I couldn’t just get my homework done in class anymore. I worked a full time job instead. But the bullying was real, all my challenges in high school were social (again, those went away in university…so I felt like it was actually easier even though I had to actually study then).

Online schooling might have been a way out of the social side of public school, though just going to college a couple of years earlier would have been ideal.

For years kids are rewarded and punished based on how well they do in school, so is it any wonder that by the end their lives revolve around this twisted system that doesn't actually end up mattering much.

I count myself lucky for realizing half way through my education that school and especially grades don't matter at all, so I could just wait out the couple last years so I can get to work life and relax.

There’s a reason why one of the most common recurring adult nightmares relates to childhood school scenarios, like having a test, and realizing do you never open the book, or never attended the class, stuff like that, is extremely common to dream about decades after such responsibilities end.

I've had those on and off in 25+ years since HS/college, but they've been more ... regular in the last few years. Not every night, but I think I have "didn't go to class" dreams (nightmares?) probably every other month now. Usually it's a college class, not HS, but same thing. Sometimes when waking up... it still feels real, and I need a moment to double check I'm really... here and not in the past about to fail a test.

Pre-college school isn't stressful for most people.

You seem weirdly insistent about this. About 20% of high school students consider ending their life and plenty more are managably miserable. This alone would seem to suggest that bad experiences are fairly common. My own was a shit experience from start to finish that could have profitably been replaced by a well chosen youtube playlist.

Can I ask how many elementary/middle school/high school kids you have worked with?

I fucking was one?

You aren't "most people" though.

Aw good for you! Give yourself a nice pat on the back :)

You have no way of knowing that.

I do because I went to school and interacted with other students. Yeah, kids run into tough stuff growing up, but that's life. To say school = stress for most needs backing up.

Exactly the same amount of backing up as "school != stress for most" does.

No it doesn't. Where are all the articles and stories from the last, oh idk, couple hundred years about how everyone is miserable at school? Sure, no one likes homework, but if you've ever been in a school, most people are having a good time.

Can we stop normalizing trauma and problems with ones social life? It's not the norm, stop pretending it is.

They're all over the place. Have you ever read essays by British, Japanese, Indian, Singaporean people describing their and their friends' mental state throughout schooling over the past several centuries?

School is also becoming more and more stressful as smaller and smaller metrics were tracked. When my grandfather went to school his parents were sent a report card twice per year. When my father went to school his parents were sent four report cards per year. When I went to school my parents were sent twelve report cards per year, and they started experimenting with an online system to track every grade on every assignment. Now that my young cousins are in school even their daily classroom participation can be tracked.

Any survey of modern schoolkids that asks about anxiety or depression has enormous rates of response in the positive.

Yes, it does. Just because one of them matches your personal anecdote doesn't waive the requirement for actual evidence.

I'm glad to hear you had a good school life. Most people aren't that lucky.

Well, I did read this article that said that school attendance increased youth suicide incidents between 12-18 percent. I wonder where I could find that... Oh wait, that's the thread we are talking about.

12 to 18 percent of what? .001%?

Worst time of my life. Thankfully my kids are not like me, but I do carefully watch for signs of trouble.

You're going to need a citation for that one.

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