School is Bad for You

by Matt Altapeter

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For something that plays such a crucial roll in the development of children, you would expect it to be a little better for you (to say the least), but the truth is that today's school land a top listing in the order of the least healthy places for a variety of categories. We'll look at four major topics in this article: sleep, stress, food, and germs. So let's jump right in.

Sleep

Numerous scientific studies have shown that teenagers have a strong tendency to sleep late into the morning. No, it's not just a matter of going to bed early. It is biologically the way a teenager's body wants to function. Younger children, however, do not have this problem. So you might expect that the schools would start later and later as the grade increases. This is not so. In fact, many high schools and middle schools start even earlier than elementary schools. Students have been shown to be more productive and retain more knowledge after a good night's sleep (need they even conduct a study to determine this?). Sleep plays a crucial roll in the development of both the mind and the body. Taking time out of a teenager's sleep is a big mistake.

Stress

America is known for having a competitive nature, but stress is known for having negative effects on people's health. So some stress due to schooling is understandable--entirely necessary even, but it gets out of hand sometimes. Students at various schools have reported having up to eight hours of homework to do in just one night (and there is another reason why going to bed earlier doesn't work). That puts a lot of pressure on people. Students cannot be expected continually to do that much work. The effects of that much stress on a developing body could be very harmful.

Food

Many schools simply do not provide healthy alternatives to the high-fat typical cafeteria food. According to a very informal "survey," most kids already don't like the foods in their cafeteria anyway, so why not just swap healthy foods in for all the fried foods and their failed attempts to interest the tastes of students. A more formal overview of a few nutritional readouts from various cafeterias has shown that the foods are indeed as bad-for-you as they appear to be (nope, that strange texture probably is not soy).

Germs

Well, this one is not so much the schools fault, but it is something to look out for. This article is not just to attack the school system, but really is an effort to inform people of things to look out for. A fairly simple, but very informal and not something you want to hear the details about, research project showed that students at a school were less likely to wash their hands after using the restroom than adults in a work environment. In all fairness, this is bias because the work environments surveyed probably contain a more specific class of people in contrast to the unique range of people at a public school. However, that would also provide an explanation to some other germy details. Since students are moving around and touching all kinds of things (such as sharing several desks throughout the day and moving from room to room) pathogens are very rapidly spread around. And as mentioned, with different types of people, there are different "levels of cleanliness" and that can cause problems.