Drop Outs
Reasons Why My Friends Dropped Out of School
Main Reasons Students Drop Out
- Bored
- Trouble
- Drugs
Bored
I grew up in great schools with great teachers and great friends but for the most part I was not challenged. School came easy to me and I felt like so much of the time I spent there was wasted. Each year we seemed to learn more or less the same things but they weren't challenging. Nothing pushed us to think harder or challenge us, and if they did it was challenging with just busy work, not anything to make you apply yourself to a higher degree. Our boredom resulted in many different things but pertaining to this discussion it lead to trouble.
Trouble
I was a trouble maker in school and thus had friends who were trouble makers as well. As time went on, and I grew up not all of our paths went the same way. I still talked with them and would get updates as to how they were doing but would mostly hear second hand what was going on in their life. Whenever someone got into some serious trouble they would often be expelled from school or suspended for a period of time. The goal of these programs is to punish kids by not allowing them to be in school but the illogical result is that the kids are getting what they want. Most of the time we were acting up is because we were bored in school and didn't want to be there. The punishments of out of school suspension or expulsion didn't make most of my friends unhappy but rather gave them a mini vacation to play video games for a week instead of going to school.
Our main problem was being bored in school. We did many things not because of disdain for our teachers or authority but simply because going against the rules produced amusement and excitement in our day. Acting up for us was a symptom of the deeper issue of being bored, uninterested, and unchallenged by school work. Schools were forced to treat the symptom and not the actual disease and thus never really helped change any of my friends who needed some constructive guidance in school rather than the freedom to stay at home and make more poor decisions.
Drugs
Going hand in hand with acting up in school was doing drugs out of school. Many of my friends did drugs to have a good time and simply bring excitement into their rather boring lives. As time grew drugs became the only thing they cared about and would often come to school under the influence of something. Eventually this caused some of them to drop out of sports and eventually out of school. The progression was always gradual and was done from an ignorant place of wanting to live in the moment.