On burning students to a crisp

When I was studying at highschool, they gave us larger and larger amounts of homework and projects and responsibilities to take care of. They motivated this practice by saying that it was a good thing – it would teach me how to prioritize and plan, to prepare me for university life.

All it did was make me miserable, because as little as you can make a coffee maker be better at making coffee faster by pouring more and more water and coffee powder into it, human beings don’t automagically become efficient planners and non-procrastinators because you pour larger and larger amounts of responsibility on top of them.

Almost everyone I know feel very bad under the stress of the large heaps of responsibility put on them. Not a single student knows how to relax without intoxicating themselves to the verge of senselessness. (Which derails my thoughts as usual: the Student Health and lots of ‘grown-up organizations’ tell us over and over again that we should drink sensibly (read: less), that it’s bad, blah blah blah. They never seem interested in finding out why people drink so much, what the actual root cause is, and how to fix the problem instead of the symptom. Am I right or wrong? Personally I have no idea, since I don’t drink, but I’m imagining that one would drink in order to rid oneself of all this stress).

In essence, we’ve all been put under more and more weight under the assumption that something magical will happen, and we’ll one day learn how to plan and prioritize, boom, just like that. In practice, some do, but most just learn to be very good procrastinators and escapists in order to cope. Okay, I’ll just get to my point already: If you’re trying to teach us to plan, why not make planning a freakin’ part of the curriculum, goddamnit?! We’ve had a dozen courses in 'studying techniques’ (how to read large amounts, how to take efficient notes, how to make presentations, etc…), but nothing on coping with a large amount of tasks. I say, make Getting Things Done or something like it mandatory reading the moment highschool pupils step in the door.