The Back-to-School Emotional Hurdles Students Face

The Reality in Schools

Most districts and schools, as they open in September, will approach the academic year as a restart. A restart, both mentally and physically, as the pandemic’s guidelines slowly diminish for students and families. 

For two years, students were either participating in virtual classrooms or dealing with COVID-19 guidelines that involved distancing, masks, and quarantine. Consequently, frequent breaks in learning just became the tip of the iceberg that was sickness, death, and trauma within various families and friends.

In all, this year, for most districts, is one that arrives without many strict policies and restrictions within the classroom. 

Socio-emotional Struggles

With that said, if there is anything that educators and academics learned from evaluating the effectiveness of pedagogy in the pandemic era, it was the importance of being in-person and the socioemotional behaviors that were lacking in students stuck behind screens. 

As a result, both the teachers and students were constantly dealing with the struggles of physical restrictions within a classroom, but also the mental health hurdles of personal trauma, family issues, and student goals. 

Two years in, many kids are still struggling. Children’s hospitals reported that self-injury and suicide cases in children ages 5 to 17 were up 45 percent in the first half of 2021 compared with the same period in 2019.

There was a nationwide scarcity of school counselors and therapists during the pandemic and the trend prevails. Two out of 3 teachers, principals, and district leaders say students are misbehaving more now than they did before the pandemic.

These statistics are not random. They are a result of a daunting issues at hand.

Emphasizing on Inner Growth

In discussing the holistic education of a young person, Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan emphasized that the goal of education is to develop a mind that is free and creative. Now, in order to achieve that, as Christopher Emdin argues in “STEM, STEAM, Make Dream,” the educator and student need to feel that their personal experience and subjectivity is valued. 

In other words, until the educational process highlights the inner growth of the student and teacher, pedagogy remains inert. Often, the concentration is on curriculum, assignments, grading, labs, and visuals, but the pandemic and its lived experience provide insight into the importance of first-person experience and mental care. 

In “restarting,” districts across the country have revamped curriculum and their buildings to prepare for the return of all students and faculty. 

But, have we, as a society, considered cleaning, refreshing, and paying attention to our minds - our lens? If not, then the idea of “meeting students where they are” or recognizing the trauma and anxiety that educators have dealt with remains an ambition of the future. 

For instance, in the past decade, various studies show that when educators made it a point for students to explore their selfhood through practices like meditation, not only were the participants happier and more engaged, the content was better understood (Orr, 2002).

Schools and Self-Awareness

 In fact, at a time like this, the tenet of Eastern traditions - holistic learning involves the inner and outer life of both the student and educator - is something to consider. The pandemic has taught us the temporal, fickle nature of the human condition, but also how our processing and digestion of it can lead to hurdles in confidence, awareness, and empathy. 

In summation, as we begin as students return to schools and colleges, let’s ask whether we are concerned only about the teaching of information, or the holistic development of young people.

Whether we see mental development as, if not more, important than content knowledge. And whether we value a future generation’s ability to understand and realize their personal selfhood.