I'm a good student. I always have been, it was engraved into my personality, my soul, my very being. It ran in my blood, this need to to please my superiors. But then I asked myself... Why? There was no one forcing me to be this way. Then I realized, there is.

We are labelled as an education system. A place where children grow up to become responsible young adults.

What we're learning is how to sit for six hours, sacrifice your life to school, put "education" before your physical and mental health.

We learn how to find the slope of the line on that graph, but how do we manage time? How do we handle ths stress of being in a world where teenagers aren't taken seriously?

But we sit and listen. It's just the way things are, they said. We keep quiet and then go home and stress some more about that presentation we have tomorrow, or the test that won't matter in the end. But we go through it. Because we're "example students."

This is what star students are supposed to look like. It's what we've been labelled as. They can despise the kids who don't do homework and get bad grades, but they will have something that the example students aren't allowed to have.

A childhood. A social life. Something beyond school. They've learned they're more than a statistic for the administrators to examine and categorize. They're human.

Yet we all experience the same stress. I want to be able to go to school and feel comfortable, rather than go home crying for the mllionth time that I just can't do this anymore.

We may be example students, but we always admire people who put themselves above the expectations of adults who tell us our problems are nothing, that we are required to stress ourselves out until we break. This isn't education.

This is a problem.