School, and Its Damaging Effects on the Brain

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This piece is about all forms of modern schooling - from grades 1 to grad school, and beyond.

It is a proven fact that a prolonged depression can shrink the hippocampus (the part of the brain associated with learning and memory) by up to 20%. In many cases, that damage can be permanent even after the depression has ended.

School triggers an artificial depression, via simultaneous over-stimulation and under-stimulation. The stress areas of the brain are over-stimulated by the inhuman amount of information that a school curriculum offers. It is not the information itself, but the sheer volume of it that causes the over-stimulation. School force feeds more trivia than is humanly possible to remember, thus putting the stress and memory parts of the brain in constant overdrive.

The under-stimulation is caused by the material itself. While the brain is being over-stimulated by the inhuman amount of work that needs to be read through, the brain is being under-stimulated by the content of the information that is being rapidly force-fed. The information taught in schools is inane, it's trivial, and other than basic math and reading, it has no practical application to real life. The information is boring, and doing the work creates an unhealthy cognitive dissonance in the brain. The understimulation is the most dangerous part, because the lack of meaningful lessons and accomplishments in modern schooling, creates a form of sensory deprivation on the reward system in brain.

By suffocating the reward centre of the brain, school artificially creates ADHD and impulsive disorders. From being understimulated, the brain, now starved of pleasure, needs to seek pleasure through instant gratification. This takes the form of excessive candy, soda pop, and sugar inake, or excessive coffee, or drug use/abuse, or the need for prescription medication in order to concentrate.

Over-stimulation eventually leads to burnout, which then exacerbates the under-stimulation, and brings the sensory deprivation to a whole new level of torture.

This sets up a reward/punishment system in the brain. I do my work, I get my mark, I get my candybar/nike shoes/weed/videogames/whatever floats my boat. If I do not do my work and toe the line, I get a bad grade, I get in trouble with parents/teachers/etc, I have no job prospects, and I am socially ostracized. Reward/Punishment!

School now is no longer about the learning, but about doing to work, to get the grade, to get the good report card, or job, so I can get the "insert consumable product here." Without instant gratification or amphetamine-type stimulants (prescribed or not), there would be many young people who would not be able to get through their studies.

Depression and stress also elicit reward and sensation-seeking behaviour in order to deal with the difficult emotions. Especially in young people. Depression, stress, and AD(H)D all play on each other, and all make each other worse.

Now the brain has been re-wired to be completely pleasure-centric, which is not healthy. That is an addict's or a child's mentality, and I see that in 20-30 year old college students and even people with jobs. A pleasure-centric life is no way to live. I'm a "little things in life" kinda guy - that's because I haven't gone to school in 2 years.

Depression and stress have been known to cause permanent damage to the brain and body. ADHD is a manifestation of that damage.

The need to "blow off steam" by binge drinking, vandalizing property, or engaging in unsafe sexual practices is a manifestation of that damage.

The increasing rates of substance abuse and mental health issues with young people in school are a manifestation of that damage. I used to be a drug addict myself, and I believe that modern schooling was a major contributor to my addiction, because it offers no healthy alternative. School and work kept me trapped in that reward/punishment cycle, and kept me trapped to my addictions.

I'm currently NEET (not in education, employment, or training), I'm clean, and I have a curious mind, and a healthy reward system. Not being in school, I pick up concepts much more easily, I'm much more well-read, I'm quite educated in politics, economics, and medicine, and I can do math much easier. When I'm a school-induced fog, all I can think about is how much I hate my work, and when is my next reward?

The architects of modern schooling got their idea from the old Prussian Model of Schooling. This was a design intended to create a populace that can be easily herded and controlled, not a populace of mature, free thinkers.

It's no surprise we have so many people graduating from college, who are not prepared for their professions, because they spent 3 years in college not learning anything.

Most elementary - high schools are simply teaching students to pass these mandatory state tests and students aren't really learning or retaining much of anything. I recently went back to school to complete a degree and was dumbfounded at the lack of knowledge of most students. On that topic, it isn't surprising when one reads about the Common Core Initiative and how children are being taught these days - couple all of this with the atmosphere and environment of most public schools and there is no way I could send a child to that hell.

My friend, you hit the nail on the head!

Damn...as bad as it was back in my day, kids have it 100 times worse now. Every part of school that is bad is made exponentially worse each year. American and British public schools are a disgrace.

Have you read:
'The Schools We Need
Why We Don't Have Them'
by E.D. Hirsch Jr

Schools are incredibly disappointing, so much so that I've ended up leaving high school to enroll in college straight away. The amount of times I've had a teacher tell me to do something with no reasoning behind it is astounding. You'd think that students would be encouraged to come up with new and better ideas, but if you insist on trying something new you'll be sent to the principle's office for disobedience. I guess it's been a couple years since you guys were in school, I can tell you it's not getting better at all...

-Wave

After "college" (you're in the UK?), are there ways to be enrolled in University?

I would bet that you'd have to take the A-Levels.

Even with the dismal education in the U.S., the kids who couldn't read at 4-5 can do so at 7, when the standardized tests kick in.

Too long no read .My brain is fried up .

http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/545716-didnt-read-lol

lol. That's an acceptable response.

I dig it.

It is damaging, and it's just going to get worse. With SBAC and PARCC in full force now, 2nd graders are force fed mass information for next year's test. And then the 3rd graders are force fed mass information on the first day of school, all the way into the standardized test. Rinse and repeat with 4th, 5th, 6th, all the way into high school to graduation. With the crazy methods teachers are doing now "because it's Common Core standard", these students are having to do 8 steps to figure out 10+10 or 5x5, rather than 1 step.
It is probably why schools offer sports, have pep assemblies, offer after-school clubs, etc. This is so that the kids can get their mind off of massive force fed information and studies for a little while. And of course, assemblies to honor those in sports, and so the students can have some over-stimulated fun (in the form of screaming/school spirit competitions...ever heard of the Spirit Stick?)
Today I was a little disappointed. We were supposed to color (yeah, like 7 year olds) the 11 states with the most electoral votes. Several students (mind you, 17 and 18 years old!) STILL didn't know Michigan had an Upper Peninsula, and didn't color that part in! These are the same kids who don't know half of the streets in town, except for a few close ones and interstates.

Not all public school systems are bad. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-are-finlands-schools-successful-49859555/?all&no-ist

Indeed, at least most of them. Thank to school for teaching me to read, even though I don't want to go back. Homeschool wouldn't have worked for me, simply because my parents suck at teaching.

Please note: I’m from the U.S. and I’m not a neurologist, I just have some experience with psychology and 14-15 years experience with a broken education system and writing plenty of reports on it.

I wouldn’t call it an ‘inhuman amount of information’. One, inhuman sounds pretty awesome if we associate inhuman with better-than-human. Two, every second of experience that you are exposed to in life (listening to music, breathing, seeing, thinking, talking etc.) exposes you to information. You are constantly being exposed to information all the time, even when you sleep (though I think certain “filters” are at play there to help you sleep). The information that schools are supposed to expose you to is different but it is still information and I don’t think it takes up anymore than ideas you can come up with yourself.

Originally schools were supposed to have various levels of difficulty. You have base classes for those with either no interest in a subject or are not capable of handling the rigors of said class. A recent trend to place more students into higher level classes (Honors or AP) has been occurring without any care put into how the student might preform in said class, all for the sake of politics and cosmetics (Schools look better when 70% of their students are in AP classes and may get more funding). Because of this you have an increase in students failing classes, not graduating, and basically getting all around screwed. There is also a trend to force every student to go to a 4 year university (which also makes schools look good) leading into things like Art School goers having to do mandated research papers and I had plenty of trouble in high school of dealing with incorrect graduation requirements. For example the school tried to make me take a foreign language, but I resisted and never did because the district graduation requirements didn’t include such a thing. So everyone else had to take a non-mandatory class because “they said I wouldn’t graduate without it”.

So already the leveling is bad. But wait, it gets worse. My school and lots of other schools have “strict policies” about academic performance and it varied from teacher to teacher. My AP classes were indeed academically strict, but the few regular classes that I had to take were socially strict, creating a weird scenario, something of which school officials never saw before, where I would perform excellent in AP classes but almost fail every single non-AP class. I had more independence and a better overall classroom structure in AP compared to non-AP. For example non-AP had grading measures where if my notebook wasn’t in a style called “Cornell Notes” I would lose points. I never did that terrible system, because my notebook was for me, not for the teacher. Regardless my grades would suffer. AP had no such thing. I never joined sports but they also had a rule where if you had below a C on one class you couldn’t participate and some of the best athletes were as dumb as rocks and they had no hope for graduating. So the school effectively denied a way for these students to get by, a potential sports career.

On top of that you have a broken curriculum that is only getting worse with Common Core (disgusting). When studying for my SAT I found plenty of things that my classes didn’t tell me. Textbooks were only given to students because it’s mandated by law that every student have a textbook. They were only opened for homework assignments, there was no reading. Teachers also like to pull this “you should’ve learned how to write like this in middle school, I’m not going to baby you it’s your responsibility” thing on every grade level. For my 3 years, my middle school forced every student to know how and to only write 5 paragraph essays because “that’s what the colleges want”. (One time the state tests came and all the classes only taught persuasive essays becuase they appeared on those tests the most and surprise surprise that essay that year was a summary. Too bad everyone wrote persuasive essays becuase everyone forgot how to write a summary.) Then I got to high school and those teachers were pissed because all the new kids only knew how to write 5 paragraph essays and colleges were telling them that was not what they wanted and now I even heard that colleges won’t even look at 5 paragraph essays anymore due to over-saturation. The max size of an essay in high school was 2 pages. Some people I know who went into college were shocked because their first assignments were “write a 5 page essay minimum…”. 2 pages almost killed these kids, I don’t even want to know what 5 pages did to them.

GPA and all the other things are also messed up as OP mentioned. Everything is a mess, and piled to gather it’s no wonder depression is becoming more of a problem and suicide rates are increasing. I've met plenty of people over the years who are ready to end it just becuase of school. Public schools suck, Charters are only slightly better, and Private… well I have no experience in private. I’d assume it’s much better academically.

If they went back to student centricity things would be better. If you put the right kids in the right classes, graduation rates would increase. The information that schools give you isn’t all entirely worthless. Only some of information is worthless to you. There’s no need to take a Calculus class if you want to go to Art School, but there is if you want to be an engineer and/or you have an interest in it. All the stuff they give you is applicable in an everyday life, but it’s dependent on the person.

The system only gets worse for Neurodiverse and disabled people.

I read the whole post. It was brilliant.

It's a kind of Colloseum-like battle arena. A place to mix all kinds of people and facilitate "lord of the flies" behavior but then punish that natural inclination at the same time.

You put kids in tribal warfare situations, then punish them when the fight-or-flight instincts kicks in. They are on constant adrenaline, and can't learn. Autistics are affected even moreso. I think we were all, unless taken to special school, traumatized by the school system.

The curriculum races through many subjects in a day instead of going in-depth on one for an extended period of time and kids end up with a shallow knowledge of everything and no deep knowledge of anything. In the end the knowledge has no value because it lacks the substance needed to be applied practically.

You get docile, traumatized working ants, who lack the intellectual fortitude and confidence to create any worthwile ripples or shockwaves in the given paradigm, be it science, politics, philosophy etcetra...

The marxist war on identity is used for this purpose. No identity? No confidence. No fortitude. No incentive.

I totally forgot about that part, I guess becuase I sort of touched on it in my "Curriculum sucks" paragraph, but not exactly. This also reminds me of extra credit, where teachers would assign it (non-AP teachers by the way) and the EC assignment had nothing to do with the class but they'd pass completely. It's terrible.


Yeah I got sent to the office so many times for fighting against all that. Though I wouldn't blame the just the teachers and higher ups, the kids weren't that bright or into anything. They were all just dead, until it came to stupid crap like planning totally unnecessary school events. For comparison on the opposite side of my city was a school (I believe it was a private school) and like the sides of the city it was pretty much night and day. The side of the city I lived on was considered "The Ghetto" and the opposite side is where all the rich people lived. I don't know why but in my sophomore year, the seniors at my school took a tour of the "rich people school" when they came back they said that the kids were snobby, the class choice was bigger, and the kids were extremely weird. The weirdness for those kids was from several situations. Apparently one kid was surprised that my school offered Calculus and his friend said something along the lines of "Yeah, but the Calculus there is easier than the one we have." which totally offended the kids from my school. They also thought we were a bunch of "nefarious ruffians" due to our living conditions, so much so where I think a bunch of kids over there were scared of us. When the kids from my school heard about that they started doing some terrible pranks (mentioned below). The weirdness was I guess during a Russian History class they had to give a report and the "rich kids" thought it was funny to go do their reports with terrible Russian accents (to be honest that sounded pretty awesome and I think I would've done something like that had some of my teachers not sucked so much).

In the end those rich kids were supposed to visit our school. Those pranks our students did involved things like saying untrue stuff like "When you guys come visit you can't bring metal pens, otherwise the metal detectors will go off and you'll get arrested", and one kid started wearing his scarf like it was a balaclava.

Yeah those kids never showed up.

There's a sign in my school's office that says "This school is an Advanced Placement honor roll school" - made by CollegeBoard, unsurprisingly.
Many of the 2016 seniors do the regular classes. Not as many in AP as there are in the 2017 junior class.
The district gets more $$$ when more kids go into AP and College in the High School (CHS) classes.
Yes, they push the 4-year universities on us. But my ONLY option is a 2-year college, that's 3 miles away from me. Which is fine...the local transit service will take me home.
With no driver's license, and the only car in our family being an almost 28-year-old Buick, which is very close to breaking down for good, it's the ONLY choice. Forget UW, WSU, Oregon et al.

CCSS even goes into keyboarding/typing for crying out loud. All 4th graders need to type a whole page in a single setting, according to this:
http://askatechteacher.com/2013/07/17/d ... standards/

Like I said, schools offer dances, sports, pep rallies, et al in order to feed non-educational information and boost the morale.
Upper elementary kids have to use this "box method" for multiplication. I volunteered about 14 weeks in a 4th grade classroom, so I saw it for myself. No, no multiplying 3x7 and carrying the 2 anymore. It involves two completely different boxes, and then multiplying two different equations and adding them up. Very confusing for 9 year olds!

No wonder we have a mess of required public education in America.