shresta

It’s mostly bizarre to me, because of the entitlement older generations have towards younger generations and the ignorance they enforce upon my generation, especially in Germany, where I grew up.

You have older generations, usually the generation of my parents, calling us lazy, unable to work well under pressure, etc. I’d like to give insight into the fact that our school system was designed to recreate a work-like state from the age of six. You go to school, learn stuff, go home, do unpaid labor, called “homework”, which has to be good, otherwise you’re labeled as stupid and unable to keep up and have to repeat a year in school. I partially had a workload of 12 hours per day, not because I was poorly structured, but because I had four school subjects per day, with four different kinds of homework which all required at least 30, if not 90 minutes of investment, to do homework properly. Add to that my dyslexia and you get at least 30 minutes more than others. But even non dyslexic students sat there for hours doing homework. I even had my mother do my homework for me, because the work load was too much. Let that sink in.

Then you have a system that rewards pupils who are never sick, by pointing out how there is one kid in class with the most sick days, as though it is their fault that they get sick. Meanwhile you have underpaid and overworked school staff who cannot handle instances of bullying accordingly, resulting in pupils being more sick, especially mentally due to continuous bullying. You create a place that is literally designed to be hostile to human nature, by forcing people to sit still for multiple hours a day, move during breaks to „prevent health problems“ in the future, but give so much homework that hobbies and personal interests can barely be done, and usually if one performs bad at school they have to quit their hobbies because they need to focus more on school or they have their parents cancel their hobbies for them (if they could afford a hobby to begin with), resulting in more stress, because of less possibilities to destress. Then you have heavy school bags that literally fuck up people‘s backs for life, because they have to carry like 10-20kgs of books and folders per day (this was my reality, I kid you not). Then we had no proper food at our cafeteria (for the first four years we had no cafeteria at all, but had to go to school until 3 or 4pm, with no proper food). 

Then you have weird power dynamics with teachers who bully you and abuse their power and give you bad grades, just because they think a person with dyslexia should not get the chance to go to university, thereby giving them bad grades, by not answering any of their questions during exams (also something that happened to me and other students as well). And if it’s not dyslexia there is another aspect that a teacher will hate about you and mock you for and treat you like you’re less than a human being than others.

Then we entered a school system that was changed by graduating one year earlier to go to university sooner in Germany, but the school books were not ready for that so we had to carry two books per subject at times, because the subjects we discussed required two books of two school grades. We had no coherent teachings and had to read a lot of stuff at home, by our selves, because the curriculum to teach us properly was not yet developed. And we were asked to understand it all and there was never time for any questions.

Then we finish with a degree, have terrible payments, cannot afford a reasonable lifestyle and are forced to suck it up. Then we have shortages in almost every area, a pandemic we went through a financial crisis, a war that effects the economy and destabilizes a lot in other countries, we have a climate crisis which no politican seems to take seriously enough to do proper change, basically my generaiton in Germany will not have any rent and no positive prospects for the future. Far right extremism seems to be on the rise world wide.

I had my first burn-out in fourth grade and had to go to therapy, because school life was so tough and nobody did anything. I had a parent at home who created immense pressure and guilt if I failed, who regularly assaulted me verbally.