- ~8 hours in school per day, often in buildings with minimal natural lighting. During the Winter, this may mean almost no sunlight all day (no recess, like in elementary school). Wanna make people depressed and give them SAD that'll stick with them long after they're adults? Just do this to them for a few years.
- Intense workload. We consider it bad when a job takes more than 8 hours a day from you. Schools routinely take 10 or more (math classes were the main culprit, at least in my case). Hope you don't have any other plans... oh look, many kids do, so now they're in actual hell.
- To add to the above: super-strict and rapid turnaround expectations on work. You cannot put something off until tomorrow because you're feeling really bad today—it was only assigned today, sure, but it's due tomorrow. Some stuff had longer timelines, but many things were the due-within-24-hours sort (again, largely math's fault, at least in my case)
- Bizarre mind games where people tell you insane stuff like "enjoy this, these are the best years of your life" and "you think this is bad, just wait until you're in the real world! This is just trying to get you ready for the expectations of adult life!" Like, I've not only worked cushy high-paid white-collar jobs, and I've never worked in an environment remotely as bad as school grades 7-12, nor with those kinds of strict expectations, nor with such inhumane treatment. When a workplace is consistently close to as bad as school, it's news (Amazon warehouses).
- Jail-like conditions. Need to stretch? Need a quick stroll for your legs? Need to take a piss? Beg the boss and hope they're in a good mood. Granted, some workplaces are like this too (again: Amazon warehouses), but most of those at least give you a couple 15-minute breaks in addition to your lunch (passing periods don't count, they're typically only 5 minutes and you'll spend most of that grabbing your stuff and getting from A to B)
- Sitting in classes all day is about as bad and mentally/physically exhausting as sitting in meetings all day, for similar reasons. Ask most people how they feel after a full day of meetings. Expand that to a whole week. Expand that whole week to 6 damn years. Yikes.
All of that is purely about the schools themselves, setting aside their strong tendency to foster awful, abusive, bullying dynamics that students cannot escape, both among students and staff. Or problems with school start times and teen sleep patterns (shit, as an adult I've rarely needed to wake up at 6:50 for anything, and if I did and I hated it I'd at least have some realistic hope of finding a way to change that pretty quickly)
I think all that makes it survivable (and I mean that literally) are the Summers and multiple long holiday breaks. When school's in session, it is brutal like few other involuntary (or de facto involuntary) activities are.
[EDIT] OH! And crazy-high expectations of self-organization and perfectionism. Here in the "real world", honest mistakes are taken in stride and my schedule and work-tracking are much simpler, plus I have a ton of support on those things. Even college tends to be far more lenient on those things than high school.
Again, I had a pretty damn good school experience, as those go, and my school wasn't one of those high-pressure ones you hear about in SV or wherever, and it was still terrible in these ways.
Covid has made this even worse, as they are not poorly ventilated disease pits.
I've met homeschooled kids. They are fine. A cousin was Waldorf schooled from K through 12. He's turned out great.
And what you describe is the better schools.
The bad schools are even worse. And the really really bad schools are even worse. People who live near them and can manage either move, or scrape the money to send the kids to Catholic or private schools.
Completely agree. Schools aren't built around what's best for people. They're a mass education system that aims to teach multiple tens if not hundreds or thousands of students all at once. To achieve that, they need all this prison-like organization to manage all those individuals. This also benefits parents who are out working during school hours. There are so many students they can't afford to know them personally and individually evaluate them, so they use these inhuman mass testing practices under artificial conditions. Applying those tests to the whole student body is too hard, so they do it infrequently which means mistakes have huge impact on evaluation which means nobody can afford to make and learn from mistakes.
I remember when I went to High School in France, I lived in the country side so it took an hour by bus to go there which means that I left home at 7:05am and would come back home at 7:10pm 4 days a week and, on Wednesday, I'd do 7:05am to 1:10pm
Between this + homework and the stress in the last year to get in the grande école I wanted lest I miss my one shot at it, it was the second most grueling work schedule I've had. The only time I worked longer hours was when I worked for a tiny Japanese company and we slept at the company in order to meet a project deadline (the contract we had with our customer meant we had to meet the deadline but it didn't matter if it was a buggy mess since bug fixing came after).
I don’t know it must be people dependent I guess. I was in the same situation distance wise from high-school than you also in the French countryside and it was some of the easiest of my life.
Workload is low. You don’t have much courses. The material is easy. I was an awkward teenager but all in all people were pretty nice. I don’t really have a complaint about high school.
Prépa was annoying however but mostly for the pointlessness of it all. Looking back I probably should have left to do something else after the first year but I can’t deny it was a good choice for my career.
I did a prépa intégré and it was significantly easier, mostly because, I lived on campus, I didn't have to commute (I get car sick so close to two hours of bus every day was tough in high school) and I didn't need to stay all the time in a school. When I had free time, I could go back to my place...
So, I guess it's not the workload so much as the butt-in-chair, long hours always being in the same place. Similar to being in Japan actually, low productivity, but long long hours... I also had a lot of stress/anxiety in making sure I get admitted to the school I wanted so I did a lot of busy work to make sure my grades were perfect above and beyond just learning and understanding the materials. In retrospect, it was overkill and pretty much un-needed.
Interesting response. Most of the above points sound to me like saying school was bad because there were classes and one had to study and do projects. I mean, sure, kids would rather play all day but there's nothing bad about having classes and having to study.
My school days were shorter at 6 hours, although if one wanted to do any of the extracurricular clubs you'd end up hanging out at school 1-3 hours afterwards. Most kids did, but it was optional.
- Intense workload. We consider it bad when a job takes more than 8 hours a day from you. Schools routinely take 10 or more (math classes were the main culprit, at least in my case). Hope you don't have any other plans... oh look, many kids do, so now they're in actual hell.
- To add to the above: super-strict and rapid turnaround expectations on work. You cannot put something off until tomorrow because you're feeling really bad today—it was only assigned today, sure, but it's due tomorrow. Some stuff had longer timelines, but many things were the due-within-24-hours sort (again, largely math's fault, at least in my case)
- Bizarre mind games where people tell you insane stuff like "enjoy this, these are the best years of your life" and "you think this is bad, just wait until you're in the real world! This is just trying to get you ready for the expectations of adult life!" Like, I've not only worked cushy high-paid white-collar jobs, and I've never worked in an environment remotely as bad as school grades 7-12, nor with those kinds of strict expectations, nor with such inhumane treatment. When a workplace is consistently close to as bad as school, it's news (Amazon warehouses).
- Jail-like conditions. Need to stretch? Need a quick stroll for your legs? Need to take a piss? Beg the boss and hope they're in a good mood. Granted, some workplaces are like this too (again: Amazon warehouses), but most of those at least give you a couple 15-minute breaks in addition to your lunch (passing periods don't count, they're typically only 5 minutes and you'll spend most of that grabbing your stuff and getting from A to B)
- Sitting in classes all day is about as bad and mentally/physically exhausting as sitting in meetings all day, for similar reasons. Ask most people how they feel after a full day of meetings. Expand that to a whole week. Expand that whole week to 6 damn years. Yikes.
All of that is purely about the schools themselves, setting aside their strong tendency to foster awful, abusive, bullying dynamics that students cannot escape, both among students and staff. Or problems with school start times and teen sleep patterns (shit, as an adult I've rarely needed to wake up at 6:50 for anything, and if I did and I hated it I'd at least have some realistic hope of finding a way to change that pretty quickly)
I think all that makes it survivable (and I mean that literally) are the Summers and multiple long holiday breaks. When school's in session, it is brutal like few other involuntary (or de facto involuntary) activities are.
[EDIT] OH! And crazy-high expectations of self-organization and perfectionism. Here in the "real world", honest mistakes are taken in stride and my schedule and work-tracking are much simpler, plus I have a ton of support on those things. Even college tends to be far more lenient on those things than high school.
Again, I had a pretty damn good school experience, as those go, and my school wasn't one of those high-pressure ones you hear about in SV or wherever, and it was still terrible in these ways.