Why do students hate school ?

Why do students hate school ?

The answer naturally varies among everyone, but the two main grievances, I think, are that school is prison-like/structured terribly and the people within are problematic.

I can attest to why I, personally, hate school—my quibbles likely resonate with students everywhere, but especially in America.

Most broadly, students cannot learn the curriculum at their own pace. Those that learn the material quickly and are ready to move ahead (most of the class) can’t because the class must learn as a unit instead of individually as students. 

A class that could take a month to master takes the whole year. And if you live in a decaying rural town like I do, only a few AP courses are available, so there is very little room for acceleration. There are also very few classes in general available.

The workload is also unnecessary. Homework is not necessary for things we already learned in class. It’s just tedious re-doing. 

I, personally, am a student-athlete with two jobs. Some days, I’m gone from home 14–15 hours. This results in awkward situations, like sleeping in the singular bathrooms and being that one friend always asking “Are you going to finish that?” Students in my shoes (plenty), are followed home by the stress of homework to do on top of all of that.

The poor use of funding is tragic. Money that could go to heating/air-conditioning, reduced lunch prices, more class options, etc. goes to unnecessary reconstruction, et al. Kids whose parents don’t qualify for a reduced-lunch-price-program must go without. 

My school shut down our middle school, cramming the seventh and eighth graders into our high school. They also replaced most of the walls with non-bullet-proof glass so that you can see every corner of every room, despite ubiquitous concern about shootings:

They haven’t even told us where to hide in case of a lockdown. And it’s been nine months since the classrooms were in use.

New policies of absolute transparency and no freedom, like literal glass walls, make school prison. 

Hall passes for schools of 213 are not necessary. Neither are 52 security cameras in a school one fourth the size of your average Walmart, blocking harmless websites (including Quora), monitoring all web activity on Chromies (even at home), or parking registration when there’s plenty of space. 

Bathroom limitations, especially when classes are 80 minutes long and you must stay hydrated for sports, are a violation of human rights:


My strongest objection, though, has to do with the culture of harassment, mean-spiritedness, and (for lack of a better word) bullying that is omnipresent in high schools and is either ignored or acquitted. 

Boys who are repeatedly reported for sexual harassment, who post pictures of guns on social media along with “I hate [our school],” who harass others and target those whose ideologies don’t match with theirs (i.e. very conservative, Christian) go with complete impunity (all true stories, BTW); meanwhile, kids who put water in people’s Gatorade bottles get suspended (my best friend), kids who laugh at or make “innapropriate” jokes or draw on desks with pencil get detentions (me), and referrals are thrown out at random—without appropriate investigation—for the convenience of the administrators.


I used my school as an example here, but these problems are universal in American public high schools, and are part of the reason teenagers hate school → possibly become depressed → possibly commit suicide.