[derefr]

> I carry 10Kg bag to school and has to do homework in 7 subjects, and get beaten by stick if I fail to do any of them separately by respective teachers, and has to spend time till 10pm after school (ends at 5 pm) at tuition to finish the homework.

That sounds more like pain, not stress. If you (or the you at the time, which is an important difference) can easily externalize your problem—i.e. blame the school for being stupidly strict, rather than blame yourself for not living up to its standard—then as much as it might be an ordeal to go through, it won’t really affect your psyche.

The concern here isn’t that school is harder; the concern is that school (and the way parents talk to children about school) is being treated with more seriousness than it deserves, and so the potential of failure at school is being seen—at least on average—as more of a personal, moral failing, an automatic source of shame.

Of course, children always treated some school environments this way—mostly high-cost private schools, intensely-competitive academic schools, and military academies. But this attitude seems to be spreading to all schools, and that’s a bit concerning.

[ryandrake]

Competition is way up now because the stakes are so high. When I was a kid, there was a spectrum of success: people who did well in school and went to college did well as adults, people who did a little well were a little successful, people who did average had average adult lives, etc. We are moving toward a bimodal winner-take-most world. Straight A’s plus good university in the right major and you’re set for life, but come up short in any way and you’re going to end up on welfare or homeless. That’s the message my fellow parents are telling their kids (I’ve heard it in person), and that pressure is the norm. The Middle Class bus only has a few seats left, and you need to do everything at 150% intensity during school to get a ticket.

[naasking]

Pain and fear of pain is stressful. I think people are trying too hard to dismiss the perfectly reasonable point that schooling used to be stressful in a different way, became more reasonable as we moved away from corporal punishment, but is now becoming too stressful again, just in a different way.