Education, education, education.

(This link is also at the end of the post, but if you are low on time and only have time to read one blog post about education at this time in the morning, then I'd advise you follow the link and read this girl's excellent article instead of my blog post: http://the-eleventh-blog.tumblr.com/post/52727074667/made-rebloggable-as-requested)

I'm one of the lucky ones. On Monday the 17th June 2013 I will sit my last A2 Psychology exam and thus end my A Level education. In August, on the annual day of nationwide emotional pandemonium for 18(ish) year-olds, I will receive a slip of paper determining the direction of my life for the next 3 years and thus, in all likelihood, my entire future. One of the frustratingly small yet disproportionately significant letters on that slip of paper will be my English Language and Literature grade, part of which - thankfully for me - will be based on a piece of coursework that I was able to spend 6 months working on. Fairly soon, however, this challenging but undeniably student-stress-saving method of assessment will be eliminated, as will the opportunity for the module-style of exams that I have been lucky enough to endure for at least the last 7 years of my life. Instead, the 'next generation' of student night-owls will be awake into the early hours revising everything they have learned for one topic over the course of two years, preparing to sit a single exam for each subject, which will be the culmination and measurement of their GCSE or A Level education.
Now I don't know about you, but that sounds like a hell of a stressful night to me. Since the 2nd of June I have been up until the borders of the early hours every night, revising for whichever exam loomed the next morning or in the next few days. I've had a nice 11 day gap between my last exam and Psychology on Monday, but that hasn't stopped the oppressive tide of stress heaving through my body, resulting in uncountable cups of tea per day and the apparent motivation to stay up late into the night revising for 2 hours of uncomfortable silence. I am, by my own very loose definition of the word, suffering from exam stress. And I've had my topics split into tolerable, modular chunks which make daunting subjects like Philosophy and Psychology reasonable easy to cope with. I cannot imagine surviving the kind of stress that would have been placed upon me if, on Monday, I was facing just one exam for all the psychology I had learned in the last two years. And yet, that's exactly what next year's students are going to be asked to do. And they can't just survive, they have to prosper and achieve under those conditions. They'll do it of course, because they have to, and this generation of students has learned to adapt exceptionally to the increasingly frustrating challenges thrown at them. It simply seems to me that the government's view of education is outdated and unrealistic, and putting more and more pressure on students in these ways seems demeaning, demanding and downright unethical for some. 
Now my knowledge of politics and the current affairs of the world is intimidatingly lacking, but someone much smarter and up to date than myself has written a fantastic article on this topic here. (As seen at the top of this post). The article is reasonably lengthy but definitely well worth a read if you have time. 
There is so much more that I wish I could say but the article definitely does it for me, and my bed has been calling for over 3 hours now. 
I bid you good night, dear reader, and to any fellow revision night owls or examination-bound: I salute you. Good luck.