How grammar school fucked me over
Right, I'm English so I'll take a second out here to explain grammar schools to the rest of the world. Effectively, it's like a gifted and talented program which has loads of eleven year olds take a test and if they score high enough they get to go to a special school, and fair enough the schools are almost always better than the free ones a lot of kids would've ended up at.
Take me, for example. I'm fairly well off but definitely not to the point that I could afford to go to private school. The school which I inevitably would've ended up at was also where all of my primary school bullies would go, and had a reputation for being a bit rough anyway. So I clung to this escape of grammar schools, took the test, passed, and off I went.
Now, I'm not going to go into depth about this, but one of the main arguments for grammar schools is their inclusiveness- anyone from anywhere can go there and get a good education, whether they are well off or not. But alas, the questions on the entry exam are fairly specialised, and whilst they are a good indication of overall intelligence, they are still often the kind of thing you can learn to be good at. So, the rich kids get tutoring, and they get in. Put alongside this the journey time and cost, (I travel an hour to school and an hour and a half back every day on public busses, which cost a few hundred pounds a year. School busses cost £400 per term) and you have a whole lot of kids who could've gone to private school taking the slots meant for the disadvantaged kids.
But the main issue that I can see, especially from the inside, is the expectations. Being constantly told you are one of the smartest children in Britain takes its' tole. Getting lower than a grade seven (an A equivalent) feels like failing here. When all of your peers cry if they get lower than 70% on tests where 30-40% is a pass, it is difficult to not press these expectations upon yourself. I didn't even realise that this wasn't how people in other schools think until I started attending clubs where people would come in grinning saying they'd got a grade six (B equivalent) on their latest exam.
The amount of mental breakdowns I witness each week is worrying, not many of my friends actually seem mentally stable at all. In fact, I know of three people who self harm, and two with eating disorders, and these are just the people who trust me enough to confide in me. Anxiety and depression are more common than hayfever.
Some subjects are so heavily favoured by the school it's laughable- stem subjects, for example, are so much more heavily funded than any of the arts, and being good at an art or humanity is often seen as unimportant- people can be amazing, almost fluent in three different languages and still believe themselves stupid because maths isn't their strong point. In fact, no matter what subjects you want to take forward to sixth form (16-18 years old, you choose 4 subjects to continue) you have to get sixes in maths and English- even if you're doing art, drama, languages and the like.
What makes matters worse is that we share a single councilor between four different schools, and so access to therapy has to be prioritized- I've seen cases of people being turned down for not being actually diagnosed with any mental health issues, despite the signs of them being clearly there. We had a talk from university medical students a couple of months ago about mental health, and watched the girl who I'd had to hug as she cried about how fat she was leave the room in a fit of tears when eating disorders were even mentioned in passing. She wasn't the only one who had to leave the room.
And what, with us being "intelligent young ladies" (I'll avoid the topic of being a trans man in an all girl's school for now) we are all constantly aware of the imminent threats of climate change and politics and all the rest of it. If you want to, imagine that whole gen z "I wanna die" *finger guns* thing times a hundred with extra doses of political revolution in the air. That's what our social interactions mainly involve. We are over informed and aware on all that's wrong in the world, and it's slowly eating us from the outside in. Children in grammar schools are treated like young adults from the age of eleven and we simply don't have the energy left to be children any more.
Tldr; grammar schools are elitist and classist; they pile stress onto literal children in order to cut childhood short. Rather than continuing this, put more money into the education of disadvantaged areas, fund the schools which poor kids end up in, and for god's sake have a councilor in every damned school.
