Exams are very strange

Do we really want our teenagers to spend their adolescence on a conveyor belt of high stakes exams?

What a strange thing we do to our young people in this culture and time.

We make them spend several years learning things that they often have no interest in, that they have not chosen and that they will in many cases never use again. We tell them that these things are vitally important.

Then we sit them in rows and make them write about the things they can remember for an intense few hours. We compare what they have written down with everyone else of the same age, and then we rank them.

We make them wait a couple of months and then we tell some that they are the successes, and others that they are the failures. We encourage them to hang their self-worth on how they performed. Newspapers publish pictures of the delighted, whilst the disappointed hide their heads in shame.

We tell them that these results will determine the rest of their lives – and then we set up systems that make this true. We provide fewer opportunities for those who did not succeed. Those who did well can take their pick of courses, whilst those who did not are made to take the same tests again and again, just to hammer it home.

We make sure that young people spend the majority of their adolescence focused on exams and under pressure. Every summer, they sit in rows and try to remember. Each year, they’re told that their whole future rests on this.

Many of them inevitably cave in under the pressure. They become anxious and depressed. They show signs of burnout by the age of 16. They lose their spark, and just go through the motions. Some of them retreat altogether.

Then we pathologise them, say that they need mental health treatment or to become more resilient. We send them for therapy or give them medication. We say that they are the problem, whilst the system carries on unchanged.

What if instead we stopped to think about what we are doing to our young people?

Adolescence is a time of opportunity and vulnerability. It’s a one-off stage of life. What if we asked ourselves, should our young people really spend these years on a conveyor belt of high stakes exams?

Imagine we allowed ourselves to look beyond this time and place, and to see just how strange this really is. What would we do then?

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