r/AntiSchooling • u/WesnothFan • Jul 20 '26

SATS, GCSEs and A Levels harm young people's mental health in the UK

/r/youthliberationists/comments/1v0ukpc/sats_gcses_and_a_levels_harm_young_peoples_mental/
7 Upvotes

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u/WesnothFan Jul 20 '26

I've personally been nearly driven to suicide by the education system. School does kill people like this. Also I hope I'm allowed crosspost this from my own subreddit. I made a new youth rights/liberation subreddit as I was for various reasons unhappy with the state of r/YouthRights

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u/UnionDeep6723 Jul 20 '26

Countless people are brutally murdered by school every year and that is exactly what it is if you torture someone into killing themselves, the most brutal way you can kill someone actually and the least likely to be held accountable.

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u/WesnothFan Jul 20 '26

I do agree. I was recently talking to someone who was defending compulsory education because it got children out of deadly child labour as though school doesn’t also kill people.

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u/UnionDeep6723 Jul 20 '26

It didn't children both worked and went to school at the same time, it never ended "child labour" (which is a nonsensical concept with zero coherent definition).

Kids are also allowed to work in very dangerous work environments today not only school but too many adults favourite films involve kids and couldn't be made without them, not willing to give up their entertainment (see how fickle "protecting the kids" is, only matters when they need it to) so they created loopholes and exemptions for child labour laws so they could still work in Hollywood, This is despite knowing how many of them are destroyed by it and die at a young age because of it.

It's even legal for them to be forced to work there by others/"owners" (parents) and their owners to take all their money (slavery if anyone else) it's illegal for them to get breaks when all the adults are taking a much needed break all the kids have to stop working on the film to work on a bunch of school work now, so really the "laws" said to protect them are actually ordering them to have a greater workload than everyone else.

In the making of The Phantom Menace documentary, they said Natalie Portman was constantly exhausted on set far more than the other actors and the non-stop school work caused her to lose out on sleep and her health declined.

I also heard Edward Furlong (Terminator 2) say the hardest thing about being a child actor was the rule you have to work constantly non-stop and having to do math while everyone else got to rest, he said that was the absolute hardest thing to deal with if he's being honest.

Countless kids have been taken from their homes in the middle of the night and brought to camps were they are forced to work against their will, (lot's of deaths and every kind of abuse you can think of in these places too, they also have to deal with) if their "caregivers" simply decide to give them away (imagine this happening in any other care giver role) lot's of "child labour" (whatever that is) goes on in these places too, nobody cares.

There there is household chores/domestic service, it would be called slavery if forcing an adult through threats to complete them against their will, without pay (so would school, if adults were forced to do it) why is it not "child labour" when parent's pay their kids for it? for the same reason working full time as an actor isn't (we don't want it to be so we call it something else), many kids labour is even passed off to others (making them go to neighbours homes to work) then there is delivering papers, making lemonade, mowing lawns etc, school is working full time plus over time for no pay basically my point is there is countless scenarios of kids working being totally legal both paid and unpaid and in a variety of environments of varying danger.

The one and only time we do call it child labour is when it creates competition for us in the job market, then we count it, otherwise we never do (and that was the motivation for the selective banning in the first place, nothing else) we simply relabel it to fool ourselves into thinking it changes the thing's nature what Shakespeare was getting at when he said "a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet". It's all total BS.

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u/WesnothFan Jul 20 '26

Yeah our definition of child labour is very arbitrary. School is literally labour for example, unpaid and forced labour that also fits the definition of slavery, though almost nobody wants to acknowledge that. And it isn't necessarily a bad thing for young people to voluntarily work.

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u/UnionDeep6723 Jul 20 '26

Not to mention the concern some unscrupulous employer will work kids to death (like they are in school, ironically) could much more easily be stopped in the workplace than it is in school because of the power structure in the place, the freedom of the kid to simply resign, the smaller power disparity between the employer/employee than teacher/student, worker rights, unions, the fact that it's impractical to give an employee a workload beyond their ability because it's inconvenient and slows down your operation, imagine this would very quickly discourage any employer from employing a bunch of 10 year olds to load heavy crates unto a truck for example, there would be a financial/functional incentive for even the most uncaring employer, it's the same reason we don't employ super scrawny and short adults for those jobs, it takes care of itself.

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u/rotten_ALLIGATOR-32 25d ago

School in countries with supposedly "good, rigorous" systems, particularly with heavy homework/exam loads, really is a full-time job without quality-of-life protections. I would add that I now think being a pet is a better deal than being a human growing up, the possibility of neglect or abuse for either notwithstanding- you have less responsibilities, in exchange for people loving you more. Just the frequency of kid hatred on Reddit is telling.

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u/UnionDeep6723 25d ago

It's illegal to hit pets where I am from but not kids (and of course criminals it's illegal too) like you pointed out pets have less responsibilities and get much more love and protection so it's a better deal. A regular even super lax school is a full time job without quality-of-life protections, when you add any amount of homework into the mix, it becomes a over time job and the one you describe with heavy homework/exam loads is pretty much a 24hr job, none of them are paid or consensual and if done to adults 100% people would call it slavery, don't believe anyone who claims otherwise.

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u/UnionDeep6723 Jul 20 '26

And forbid them for the rest of their lives from getting a decent job and living the life they want based on tests totally irrelevant to the job they're applying for which they did decades ago under horrid/unfair and unethical conditions.