Pressure points

📅 Published: August 21, 2025

📰 Source: thestandard

Curated by AllZimNews.com

School life for children is full of pressure, which comes in all different forms.

Most notably and obviously, there is peer pressure, where no-one wants to be the odd one out.

Dead Poets Society has a scene where the teacher underlines this: he takes the pupils outside into the quad and tells them to walk around, whereupon the pupils walk round the quad and soon end up walking, marching in time with each other, and all the others clapping along in time, without being told to do so.

He then pointed this out to them and asked them to find their own walk — this time the pupils walked in all sorts of different styles (many of them being outrageous, humorous, bizarre).

Sometimes youngsters are sucked into simply doing whatever everyone else is doing but they must have their own walk.

They must suck the marrow out of life, “to live deliberately” (Thoreau).

The pupils also experience huge parental pressure, with their parents demanding they get the highest results, to go into certain professions, to certain universities, to excel (even if they are not gifted or interested in a certain area).

Such pressure is more unforgiving as they have the authority over the child and demand they obey.

One pupil ends up committing suicide due to this pressure.

Tradition also plays a huge part in the school but we might note how someone once said, “Tradition is peer pressure from dead people”.

Though the world is changing, many people want things to stay the same; pupils are required to succeed to do all that their predecessors achieved, for the school.

The school itself is under pressure to produce results by promoting the school’s great value on results, university places, professions later taken up.