Make school a better place

School system problems, suggestions. Teenage life, needs. Curriculum wishlist. Thoughts on teaching music.

You adults forget how complicated teenage life is. How difficult it is to learn to find our place, to understand the things we took for granted. To figure out money, love, sexuality. To face our childish needs and nature. To learn how to treat others, the social codes of our connections. We're longing to be taken for full, to make our own decisions, while dabbling in false assumptions about the world. We're blindly fooled by group pressure, media and addiction. All of which is hard and important to learn.

You stuff our curriculum with everything you wish to see our there in industry but you don't take care of what is actually important for us in life. Some of us eventually learn these things by making mistakes, at a terrible cost. Some of us never manage to find their place, though mere lack of confidence and orientation. Many of us keep a schoolbag of regrets and burdens to carry on our back in adult life.

This article is a result of recurring nightmares I keep having, in which my adult self is taken back to my time at second school in Germany, as well as discussions with other people who remember school as a nightmare.

We all have been affected by the shortcomings of our school systems, in one way or another. I deeply wish to stop us from passing the same stress and competition on to children. I wish that we get aware of our comfortable position in rich western countries - and that we do our best to enable children to unfold their personal potential, to enter adult life with a better confidence and guidance, with less blocked roads and a more positive view on life in general.

We need to make school a better place.

As a teenager, we're not able to put a finger on the problems. Because our situation is the only normality we know and we imagine. Just with some years distance we see the issues caused by the school system and a very outdated idea of how school must be. So I teamed up with my younger self and made a list of the problems we encountered, of possible solutions / alternatives we see and of the subjects that never have been taught, which were miserably missing in adult life.

Problems:

+ School starts too early. Lessons starting at 7:50 mean getting up at 6:00 every day to rush down morning routine and then, mostly, to run to catch the bus. Already the way to school is draining my energy and on most days I have no idea how to survive the day. I'm fighting myself from hour to hour, struggling to stay awake and to catch anything of what's going on at the board.

+ 5 days presence lessons without a recharge day in between is a problem for introverts. I used to enjoy going to school, but with afternoon school now, on Mondays I have no idea how to survive the week. I'm just permanently drained.

+ Workload: With the early mornings plus afternoon school, I'm completely dead when I come home. I don't see how to keep up my music and sports activities next to that. I wish I could keep some energy, to follow these social activities which are a good balance in my life to the school problems. I also want to engage myself with learning new things outside of school. I'm starting to loose connection with my friends because they are busy with school and music and have no time to meet at the weekend.

+ Curriculum: Much of what you teach me is completely irrelevant for me. I wish I could have this brain space free for actually figuring out life. In contrary, very important things are missing. See wish list below.

+ The food options are terrible. I'm supposed to survive a day from 8:00 to 17:00 with a lunch package from home and a piece of salami pizza on a good day. This is my normality, but in fact my brain is not working well. Maybe because I'm spending most lessons being tired, cold and hungry.

+ I'm sitting in the corner of a class of 30 people. It's one of 5 classes for my grade, at my school. I'm tired of fighting for attention. Now I'm just invisible and feeling irrelevant. Nobody notices I'm even there. Nobody cares. The moment I'm actually called to speak, I'm so nervous that I don't get my brain together.

+ Teaching is frontal at 95% of the time. Board, table, squeaky wooden chair. Aside from sport lesson, I only move to change rooms, carrying the heavy backpack around. I'm not used to be outside. I almost never actively do something else than writing down exercises. My brain is fried of frontal input. I want to do something else with my hands than holding a pen. I need new impressions, change of scenery, break of routine, outside tasks other than running, to get in an active mode. And I need enough sleep to participate.

+ School books are a lot of heavy weight to carry on my back all day long, and back home, exhausting me even more. Most of the contents we don't use, especially not on that day. Does this really make sense? Where is this digital age everyone is talking about...?

+ My daily life is people excluding me, ignoring me, picking on me. Sometimes I pick on others to feel a bit better. It's just normal, isn't it? Sometimes it's a nice distraction to push boundaries and pick on a teacher. I heard the words mobbing and burnout. They sound really intimidating but I don't really know what it is and what not. Probably I'm not concerned, it's more for... situations which are really bad.

Suggestions:

Times and efficiency:

Make school start later.

Studies show that early lessons are contra-productive for teenagers. We need more sleep then adults, we have hormonal shifts to manage and we have a later rhythm than adults at age 40+. Forcing us into your schedule is draining, undignified and terribly inefficient. I promise we are way more attentive and open to your lessons when we don't need to constantly fight against our own most basic needs.

School presence or home education? :

I see the importance of having a social environment and the dangers of home education in isolation. Nevertheless, it's important that it's a good environment and, as an introverted person, I desperately need to be able to withdraw and to recharge.

Please don't push me to school 5 days a week. I suggest a combination of presence days, practice days and home learning days. A free day should be in between (French system: Wednesday free) to allow us to catch up on sleep, work or to simply relax from school's struggles and obligations and to make space to keep up social activities of choice. No home work on presence days.

The rhythm could be:

- Presence day

- Presence day

- Home day (~ 2 hours of home work)

- Presence day

- Practice + activities day (choice school / home)

- weekend free

In my experience, when there was something optional going on like a maths coaching, I tried to attend, despite my drained state, because I did not want to miss out on something that could be important. Just having the option to stay at home when you really need it would be a huge relief and also let us learn to manage ourselves and to set priorities.

In Norway, where school ways are long, there are options for parents to combine home education and school presence for children to adapt to their activity schedule.

Sport:

+ Stop forcing us to run ourselves to exhaustion in circles while playing beep tones on a recorder in shortening intervals. This undignified grading needs to be forbidden and the supporters of this practice are to be found guilty to pay compensation for the physical and mental pain they are doing to young adults on a large scale. What is the lesson we're supposed to learn, about needing to speed up when we get tired? Our physical condition is nothing which we can improve at that age by trying harder. What exactly do we get graded for?

+ Remove the obligations to do activities we don't enjoy together with others who don't like us. Surprisingly, we don't learn any pleasure on moving this way. It's different when we discover an activity we like. Give us a choice of ongoing activities and make us pick one or two each year as sport class, to get us in a better state physically and mentally than teenagers have been for generations. (Ball games, athletics, dancing, swimming, outdoor,...)

Care:

Could you give us someone to talk to in privacy - and make us know that it's okay and good to talk about problems, difficulties and wishes on a regular basis? Someone who really cares and can give advice, offer help, maybe talk to parents?

I never feel like I can talk to anyone. Mobbing, lack of connection, family trouble, menstruation pain, constipation, akne, long school ways, online escapism, feeling of being irrelevant, that's how life is just everywhere, right? Nothing to complain about. Things are surely worse for others. I need to manage myself. Even though life is a mess.

Relevant subjects to add:

Health / nutrition / biology

How does sugar work in our body / brain? Which nutrients do we need for what? What helps to get in a good state mentally and physically?

Can we talk about common teenage health issues (mentioned above) - and learn that there are ways to deal with that, instead if enduring it in shame and isolation?

Can we please learn medicine basics to manage simple things ourselves instead of running to the doctor for each hair follicle inflammation for all our lives?

Could we please talk about mobbing, exclusion and integration in junior high school / Mittelstufe class?

At secondary school with good reputation, sexual education was terrible. I was an attentive pupil with rather good grades, but I got a completely wrong idea of the menstruation cycle and could not recognize my fertile phase of the month until I got the idea to read up the shameful topic again at age 30, and to watch my body more closely. Lucky that I got this far without accidents.

We need to get over our shameful christian attitude and invite open discussion and acceptance into our lives and schools.

Crafting project weeks

I'm sad that I don't get in contact with crafting during my school time. I would be glad to have an occasional break of routine, to work with my hands on material, electronics, programming, sewing, building, repairing things. It would be great to get girls in touch with crafting and electronics and boys with sewing and cooking. I get the impression that, as a future academic, I'm getting prepared to sit in an office, to buy new things and to pay others for the hand work and I hate this attitude. I wish I could experience different ways of crafting and learn that I can create and repair myself what I need.

Agriculure basics, sustainability

Please give us insight into the basics of life. It's stupid to keep depending on global economy and international industrial farming. I hate to not have a clue how to ever support myself without products, while growing up in a technologically advanced country with the knowledge to produce food at the place where we need it. I'm wrapping my mind about logarithms but I have no clue about which plants are edible, what's the danger with raw meat and eggs, how the things get to the supermarket, how cheese is made and why cows keep giving milk. What academic shall I become without a minimum of orientation about the things I depend on?

Ethics

Please stop having us study texts of old philosophers, which are not relevant for our complicated lives at this point. I need to get aware of how I'm treating others. It sucks to admit, but I need orientation how to be respectful. Someone starting a discussion, planting these thoughts and questions in my head. How to empathize with adults' struggles and teachers. How to take care for friends instead of only seeing myself. How to be humble. How to trust and to forgive. How to differ courage from foolishness. I need to find out how to be a good person. How to earn myself the respect and love I'm craving. I want to talk about my value to society as an individuum, and how much trust I can have in society. About how my own decisions impact society and what I can do to make a change. I wished I put some thought into compassion and animal rights, because my blind way of life is damaging others and myself.

Law basics

Please help me to understand my position in society and my rights. Prepare me to recognize fraud and abuse and teach me how I can protect and defend myself as a young adult without guidance and money. What are my rights as an employee? What can my future boss demand, where is the line to exploitation and what can I do?

Tax basics

Please let me understand the tax system and why it is important to me and to society. Give me an orientation about living costs - the money I need for my future flat, study, life investments. And then let me know how the hell I'm supposed to ever earn that much money. Teach me to know the value of my work and life energy. How to write an application. And give my a rough idea of what I need to know to start a one person business to realize my own ideas - just in case I get sick of being pushed around by others.

Subjects to cut down:

Reducing the workload while adding new things at the same time is, obiously, a question of priorities. Here some points that were cluttering my days but which my adult self could happily do without.

+ Math basics are important. I'm happy to understand rule of proportion, geometry and probability. I spent hours and hours pushing functions around without knowing why and tracking down typing mistakes in my calculator. This has not become relevant in my life after school and I wish I had learned other things instead. What's the point in demanding things which keep ruining the degree for young people year by year?

How about splitting Maths in a mandatory basics course and an optional advanced course for people interested in it, as a preperation for technical university subjects?

+ German basics are important. I'm glad to have a sense of spelling, to understand our grammar and (sometimes) to be able to place a komma where it actually belongs. What we did from grade 8 on I don't even remember. It has been a mandatory main course to read old, stiff books at home and to discuss them in class. Why must something beautiful like language, role playing and fantasy be old and stiff?

Let us have a basics course. Then, a book circle, a theater group and a creative writing group for people who are interested in it. Let us be active and explore language in ways that we enjoy.

+ In foreign languages, in a class of 30 people, I got my degree without ever speaking a word (except the 3 embarassing times I was picked to read out an exercise). I was not lucky to get chosen for school exchange. I didn't get the option to get over the blocking to actually start speaking and I didn't get any confidence in my skills. Going abroad was unimaginable at that time.

Could we have contact with pupils from other countries as part of the lessons? Keyword "digital age", it would be exciting to actually realize in school that the world is larger than Germany and that there are young people in our age going to school in France, Scandinavia, Australia in this moment. Much more exciting than reading texts from a book. It would be intriguing to use the language I'm learning to ask them about life and school at their place, and to see that many people are actually curious about my "boring" home country, German club culture, trash seperation and Rammstein lyrics.

+ Art: Let's have one mandatory basic exercise project each half year to get the people in touch which creative things. Then make it optional to continue further projects. No point in pushing the people who think creative expression is embarassing when being with cool friends.

Let it be a refuge for people who enjoy it, to be among themselves.

Music lessons

Most of the lessons (outside of music focus) were a waste of time. Teaching music from a book, talking about famous dead people and writing tests about scales, is nothing but arrogance and misunderstanding of the essence of music, very common in German academic circles.

Music has been an important part of social life since the old days. Bringing people together, making them dance, giving a sense of community.

Teaching music should involve the young people. Be open to them and without judgement of right or wrong. Music should encourage activity, feeling of community and make space to participate, in your way, at a moment you feel like it.

The most important thing about getting people into music - or getting music into people - is to deal with the fear in a society where you're "not good in music", you "can't sing" and what you're making is never "serious" to high society. Most people I talk to never get over this fear to be judged, and never get to enjoy this beautiful way of expressing themselves and connecting with others. There's no point in pushing them to learn the techniques of counterpoint.

Let us make small groups, take percussions and play rhythms together. Let us listen to folk music from the world next to our old european classical music which feels dusty and aloof to our young brains in this phase of our life. Musician guests showing their instruments around would be more interesting than the cd player. Let's bring different instruments to the lesson and try to play them, before we think about scales and theory. It could be a great and easy project to make a hand drum or a small flute ourselves from materials.

How did vinyls store stereo music and how does our music come into our head phone?

Can we bring our favourite songs to the lesson, no matter how trendy or simple they are? Because our brains are still evolving and the music which we enjoy can be very meaningful and emotional to us. We need to feel respected with what we feel and like instead of feeling judged and pushed into what is considered cultural. We should learn an open attitude and respect towards others, different styles and tastes.

Make a space where one person is not better than the other, but where everyone is welcome and good as they are. Then, make an optional advanced course, teaching scales, playing instruments together and analyze classical music for the ones who want to do.

Conclusion

Teenagers can make cool things when granted the space, their own rhythm and some encouragement. Some of what adults are failing to do since years. Starting climate change manifestations before the parliament, for example. Fixing mum's computer. Recording a music album on dad's synthesizer, inspiring people all over the world to a new musical style.

Or programming an app to scan the police stations in Norway for free appointments, saving thousands of people lots of time and energy while getting their passport.

Teenagers are very capable of self-learning something they are excited about. What seems like wasted time to adults not taking the effort to understand their interests, is the start of a person finding their own way. People who like to hang out with friends are developing connections and social skills which are very helpful in adult life. Regarding the former pc game addict of my generation, some of them are working in media industry now. During their online games they made international friends for life, gained media competence, expressed their creativity and did heavy team management by keeping a raiding guild together.

Teenagers, like adults, are not lazy per default. Everyone I talk to has the wish to be independent, to create, to do something more meaningful with their life energy than playing games and smoking weed. We're craving to be loved and respected. We need to find out how to get things started while heavily struggling with figuring out life. Then we get stuck and thrown out of track a 100 times.

We need less pressure to follow the tracks you (society) set for us, and more support to find our own ways, in our own rhythm, in a world which is more and more globalized, competitive and hard to view through. We need to feel encouraged to share whatever is interesting to us.

We need patience and pardon for our ways, because it's hard to learn to question our own moods, cravings and impulses. Even for adults, right?

Please make space in our life for our basic needs and interests. It's way more efficient - and less frustrating - to learn by choice and fun than by force.

Sophie

& younger self