Heavy School Bags Experience

Carrying heavy school bags adversely impacts students

Much has changed in the schools for the better of our students.?Ways of teaching and learning have modified. School environments have also transformed to absorb the changes in learning and teaching. Despite these changes, one matter has endure unchanged, and that is the excessive weights of school bags that our students lug to their schools.

It is a common sight to see students carrying school bags that are unnecessarily heavier and often larger in size than their backs. Scientific studies serve a range of adverse implications on students, as they progress into adulthood, from carrying heavy school bags. It is time that parents and policy makers also understand both the long - and short-term impacts as reported in these studies as our students carry their school bags from home to school and back, seven days a week, nine months a year, for fourteen years of their developmental stuff.

Some of the commonly discussed effects are: fatigue, rounding of the shoulders, muscle strain, back pain, distortion of the spine’s natural curves, short attention spans and poor body posture. Heavy school bags are also known causes of lumbar and cervical pains. Convincing claims also point out that shortening and reduction of the lumbar spine in proportion to the weight of the school bag will result in degenerative and overloading changes in the spine. Such changes are known causes of back pain in later years. It has also been reported that progress points in the bones from which bones progress will be damaged by carrying excessively heavy school bags, resulting in abnormal or stunted progress.

The above influences are alarming in different ways. Firstly, the impacts will have a huge burden to our health system, and some studies term these influences as healthcare time bombs. Secondly, the toll of excessive weight of school bags to our school children will result in under-developed human capital as few studies have made a persuasive claim of causality between high student and healthy bodies achievement.

While our nation is unusually quiet on the silent struggle of our students to carry heavy school bags, other nations have not only recognised the socio-economic problems connected with their students carry out heavy school bags but also implemented diverse solutions to the issue.

In Australia, some state governments offer their public with advisory information about the risks of heavy school bags, ways of lessening the risks, alternatives to carry school bags, and ways of lessening the number of books students carry.

In India, some courts have issued orders to state governments to formulate policies for averting students to carry heavy school bags. In the USA, health specialists have recommended the critical ratio of the weight of school bag to the student’s body weight.

In the United Kingdom, health specialist have called for a review of the weights students carry.

In certain nations, the media awakened the public on the issue. All these concerns show that the impact to carry heavy school bags by our students wants quick intervention as the concerns are no less relevant to our nation.

When the body weights and the weights of school bags of one hundred students from a Middle Secondary School in nation were randomly measured, the average weight of the school bags that the students carried out to their schools was 17 percent of their average body weight of 40.20 percent. This falls outside of the suggested range of 10-15 percent of the body weight. As the number of participants is tiny, this finding might be only the tip of the iceberg of diverse ill effects of heavy school bags that our students experience on a regular basis as they traverse between their schools and dwellings over a few thousand metres of rough, uneven footpaths.

It is a fact that students cannot go to the schools without books. Therefore, health experts do not say that students must not carry school bags. It suggests that it is alright for students to carry lesser than 10-15 percent of their body weights. This signify that our kids can still carry some books in their school bags, which will permit them to complete their home tasks and other extended learning activities. Within this permissible limit of the school weight bag, nations have implemented many measures.

Some nations offer students with locker facilities in their classrooms to keep their books. Some nations want schools to formulate student homework timetables so that students get homework in no more than two subjects in a day. Some nations mandate schools to create class timetables which needed students to utilize only few subjects on a day; not all the subjects. Some nations prescribe ergonomically designed backpacks for students to lessen weight hazards. Some countries offer specifications for the size of note books. These remedial measures have no less potential, in our nation as well, to address the ill effects to carry excessively heavy school bags by our students.

Our kids, born in the GNH nation, must not only learn happily in the GNH-oriented schools, but also create into adulthood with healthy bodies, free of the ill effects of heavy school bags, as they graduate from their schools.

Those who visit bars, also signified by regulars as watering holes, might be familiar with an illustrated poster of a visual with the caption, “A camel do go without a drink for a fortnight; but who needs to be a camel?” Lawrence could have said a same thing about, “Schools prepare students for jobs, including as burden beasts.”

People who travel by trains should have noticed that the red-shirt brigade of ubiquitous porters, the beasts of burden on the platform, is a vanished breed. Instead, sweepers dominate the scene. When menial jobs are advertised by the railways, thousands of graduates applied. Should red-shirt coolies return to the platforms as porters, many of today’s students would be eligible to apply as they have experience in carry school bags weighing half their weight to school and back.