Stress at School...

A few days ago I was sitting with an old friend from school.
As it often happens in such situations we started talking about the good old days especially the last two years of school (classes 11th and 12th).
We passed out about 9 years ago so it was fun going back to those final days at school.

Suddenly my friend remarked that while those days were amazing he would never want to repeat them.

Now I was thinking along the same lines as we had been talking about school. So I was naturally surprised to hear my friend giving voice to my thoughts.
Then he went on to say that he still gets nightmares sometimes that he has failed the Board exams in 12th and he wakes up in a panic. Once he is awake and realises that those days are behind him he manages to relax.

When I heard this I was even more surprised. I was surprised because I get similar nightmares sometimes. But my nightmares are about having missed many school days (I used to take quite a few holidays in 11th and 12th) and then having to rejoin.
I think what will teachers say, how much of the course I would have missed and what will my friends ask me? Sometimes I too wake up in a panic thinking that those days are back.

This got me thinking about the hidden stress at school. Schools are supposed to be places where a child can grow and develop, not where they develop subconscious stress.

A few questions came to my mind:

Is school supposed to give you nightmares 10 years down the line?

Is that perhaps a 'fringe benefit' of formal schooling?

Maybe we don't take enough time in preparing a child for education like a farmer prepares a field for crops to be planted. I wonder if this is a growing trend in children especially in today's highly competitive study environments where each half percent can mean the difference between success and failure. Where children are evaluated on the basis of exam results and not their true aptitude.