The role of our schools is to give children an education and prepare them for life as adults. As with many other aspects of our society today, our school systems have problems that make this goal difficult to achieve. These problems range from small, such as cafeteria food being disgusting, to large problems, such as lack of respect between teachers and students. A problem that has not been fully explored is fear. Fear is in our lives every day; from being afraid of a little spider, to being afraid of having no one to sit at the table with. Everyone has fears, as children and as adults. The fear a teacher feels towards his or her students can change the way the school is run, just like the fear a student feels towards a teacher. Fear has taken hold of today's school system and changes the way teachers teach their students, as well as students' abilities to learn the subject matter correctly. When I was in school, students ran the school by spreading fear in the hearts of the teachers. They tortured teachers they didn't like by putting laxatives in their coffee or water in the gas tank. There was one student who hadn't turned in an assignment all year but had gotten good test scores, so he passed. At the end of the year she handed in all her homework to the principal to demonstrate the teacher's failure to evaluate the homework and, in this way, get her fired. Actions like these escalated to the point where we had to employ eight English teachers in one semester. Students cannot learn subjects adequately when a class is attended by so many teachers. But this type of accident was typical. Teachers feared they would be fired or that a student would make them cry today. These types of events happen not only in the school I attend...... middle of paper ......ied, having a good teacher or bad teacher, and whether their friends are really friends. I know from experience that school can be an extremely threatening thing. High school wasn't easy for me. I remember walking down the halls and getting tripped and stepped on, and sitting in class with paper thrown in my hair, and walking into the dining room toward someone standing up and yelling, "Here comes Kansas" because I had chest dish. There were many days when I was afraid to come to school because the bullying was so bad. But that wasn't the only thing I was afraid of, I was also afraid that my friends weren't necessarily my friends and were talking behind my back, which had happened many times before. There is also that teacher present in every school who focuses only on some students and therefore makes learning the subject impossible. Students fear school as much as teachers.