> Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers. They would be in the way in an office. So they drop them off at school on their way to work, much as they might drop the dog off at a kennel if they were going away for the weekend.
Schools are government-subsidised daycare first, educational institutions second, which is the reason they often fail at teaching students but rarely fail at keeping them in place.
From that perspective, why would you change a child's school hours to anything less compatible with their parents' work hours? If anything, I would expect the trend to be towards longer hours at school, perhaps by more tightly integrating after-school activities.
Except we're not talking about people who need babysitting, but people who are babysitters. High school students are perfectly capable of waking up and getting ready for the day after their parents have left the house.
There's no good reason for high school hours and parents work hours to be coupled, unless it is necessary for a parent to drive the kids to school on their way to work (i.e. because the bus is too slow and would require waking up hours earlier).
In which case the actual problem has nothing to do with education policy, and everything to do with the parents' decision to live in sprawl.
A lot of school districts don't have buses except for special needs students. That puts the onus on parents to provide transportation until the students are old enough to drive.
I'm from Poland and I went to a private school - out of the 1000 students at school I think maybe 5 were dropped off by their parents, and it was a sign of extreme wealth, all kids are expected to walk or take a bus to school. When I started primary school at the age of 7 I walked to school, it was like a mile away. My parents also left to work before me, I had to lock the door behind me, and when I got back from school they wouldn't be back yet usually. I'm pretty sure kids are perfectly capable of getting to school on their own.
> When I started primary school at the age of 7 I walked to school, it was like a mile away.
The US is about thirty times larger than Poland and much of it was developed after the wide adoption of automobiles. Few children live within a mile of their school here, and of the ones that do, there are often not walkable routes to get there. Many roads in the US have no sidewalk and are intended only for vehicle traffic.
In the 60s - 80s, most kids walked to school unassisted. This was the norm. I used to walk 1.5kms when I was 5 and today, my kids walk less than 500m. Still, helicopter parenting and Political Correctness has (as another poster stated) almost made this a crime.
I am one of the few parents that trusts their own kids to walk a short distance to school by themselves. I have received a few comments from other parents implying negligence for trusting my kids.
I have doubts that it's busy roads that changed this behaviour.
The metro areas include a great deal of sprawl where the schools (and even the drugstores) are separated from residential subdivisions by several miles of fast roads with no sidewalks or bike lanes.
Look for the percentage who actually live in the cities, vs. the metro areas.
I live in the District of Columbia, call it three miles from downtown. The high school students in the neighborhood who are in public schools attend Wilson High School or one of the district's magnets, namely School Without Walls and Banneker. Banneker might be a mile and a half away, Wilson and Walls are more like four miles. I will say that it appears to me that most of them take public transportation to and from school.
And when I lived in the Denver suburbs, my brother attended a couple of county schools. The junior high was at least a couple of miles away, the high school more like five. Do not underestimate American sprawl.
Personally, I think that sounds cool, but it's pretty far outside of the norm in the US in several ways.
Part of it is the spread-out car culture of the US, where virtually the entire country is so car-centric that walking anywhere is prohibitively difficult and/or risky. It's kinda self-reinforcing - walking is awkward and discouraged, so almost nobody does it, so there's no incentive to fix any of the walkability problems, like missing or neglected sidewalks, bad traffic light behavior, huge parking lots everywhere to cross, etc.
But the bigger part IMHO is the stranger-danger paranoia. Google the free-range parenting movement here for a few disturbing stories. The media hypes up stories about rare child molesters who kidnap children off the streets for better viewership numbers, then people start to think that kidnappers are everywhere and you don't dare take your eyes off a kid for a minute. This makes its way into policy and expectations. Add that into the common viewpoint here that if you have a child, they must be the most important thing in your life and your entire life must be centered around improving the kid's life. You get a society where letting a child, or even teenager, walk to school seems so outrageously dangerous and irresponsible that kids may sometimes be picked up by the police and returned to their parents even though nothing is wrong, and the parents may sometimes even be investigated themselves for their supposedly wildly irresponsible behavior.
This is the absolute truth. However, what's interesting is that the world is still basically the same as 50 years ago in terms of safety.
When I first went to school, my mother told me not to accept lollies, gifts or rides from strangers. The same fears existed, but people tempered those fears and kept paranoia in check.
What has most probably changed is the social attitude which has become far more judgemental and much more intolerant. I've given a lot of thought to these social attitudes and I see today's society as closer to the Torch and Pitchfork scenes in Beauty and the Beast (think of the feminist attack on Matt Taylor by The Verge as one of many examples of extreme verbal aggression by the masses). This mob intolerance has become popular and frequent in the last 10 or so years.
Oh, absolutely. All of the numbers I've seen say that pretty much all kinds of danger are rarer than in the supposedly good old days. Yeah, there are some risks, but you take some reasonable precautions and get on with life instead of trying to reorganize society around reducing every risk to zero.
The media and political classes just creates an environment where it seems more dangerous for their own benefit. People who are constantly afraid buy more newspapers/click more news links and will vote to reduce their own rights. All the better if the dangers are essentially imaginary - the gravy train can keep running without worrying about figuring out something to do that actually solves the problem, or the problem going away once it's solved.
This post is completely irrelevant to Europeans, imho. Nowhere I know of, does any school start any activity before 8 AM. In the UK it's 9 AM in most places, in Italy it's 8:15 or later. Anything before 8 is extended daycare for parents who cannot fit the regular schedule. 7:30 start sounds totally insane.
I'd be careful with "europeans", because primary school started at 7:00 for me in germany and gymnasium at 7:10. I had to stand up at 5:30 every day (and got to bed at about 23:00).
Most german friends I know of started earlier than 8:00 too (most started at 7:30). And yes I'm talking about actual lessons starting at that time - not "day care". Even though from our point of view there seemingly wasn't really a difference between those anyways...
Which is also not likely to change. Again: "Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers." Why move just for the sake of your kid's four years in high school?
This may not apply to urban families who take a train or bus to work. I commuted to high school on a subway by myself, and would have preferred leaving an hour or two later.
You hit the nail on the head with this one. High school hours are specifically set to end earlier than elementary and middle school hours. This is so that high schoolers can pick up their younger siblings and walk them home while parents are still at work.
What is it with parents driving their kids to school these days? Or is it a US thing? Back when I was in school, every single kid would ride the school bus. Well, except those close enough to walk/cycle, or those old enough to own and drive a car or scooter.
Where I grew up, you had to live more than 2.2 miles to qualify for the bus. I lived 2.1. Not an ideal distance to walk, especially since most of it was major roads without sidewalks
I lived 1.5; I bicycled most days. My story for my kids will involve uphill both ways, off roading when there was traffic, through a graveyard, and a few days with limited amounts of ice/snow.
Exactly. I was walking over 3 kilometers (2 miles) to school since I was 7 years old (I started school at 6, so I my parents drove me for a year to adjust). Nowadays parents treat their kids like they were made of candy glass.
Geez, if I put all my high school books in my bag it weighed 40 pounds (I measured it once). And the cold weather means walking wasn't always an option.
I live in Wisconsin and ride my bike to work throughout the year. Amusingly, it's often up-wind both ways, because the wind changes direction during the day. My kids walk or bike to school, or take the city bus.
No, it was pretty flat. I'm amused that this sounds improbable, though. Cold isn't that big of an obstacle. I hated Wisconsin winters, but it's just a matter of dressing properly.
I lived 2km from my primary school, and 4km from my middle and high school. My school bag was 16kg.
And it was easily possible to walk there, or later, bike there. (although I had to walk every now and so often when my bike broke down in -14°C in winter).
Different cultures I guess. I definitely would not have done that as a kid, my parents wouldn't have allowed me to, and someone would have called the police if they saw a 10y/o walking along these roads
It must be culture, at least in areas where walking to school is pretty convenient. Anecdote: When I was growing up, I walked to elementary school, all of five or six neighborhood blocks. The one kid who got driven to school, got teased for it.
Today, same school, same neighborhood, is a traffic jam every morning, as the kids are all driven to school. I could very well imagine parents saying that it's no longer safe to walk, due to the traffic. :-(
Every student on a residential college campus that's bigger than tiny is going to walk 3 or 4 times that in a day. Middle school students will stress their bodies a few orders of magnitude harder in sports practices (or even light exercise).
I've always had problems with my feet and legs, so I'm probably just paranoid about it. No way I could walk that much on a regular basis without surgery.
If you can't walk the equivalent of five lengths around a standard track without stress fractures you have a serious, debilitating disease and should see a doctor immediately.
Isn't a standard track only ~a quarter mile (400m)? With a 40 lb pack, twice a day, plus hills, on young bones, with poor judgment about balance and weight placement, someone's going to get hurt. Stress fractures didn't seem implausible, though I suppose ligament injuries are more likely?
And yes, every specialist I've been to has said all I can do is try to protect my joints until I eventually decide I want surgery.
The opportunity to learn here is prioritization and utilization. Will you need all books at home today, can I do this homework at school during lunch, study hall, or before after?
I wouldn't need all books all days, but some days I did. I didn't usually have a study hall. I'm not sure what learning has to do with it? I don't control how much homework gets assigned or when.
I'm a Junior in highschool and I have the same problems. Some teachers require you to bring all your books to their class every day. Others usually use textbook information to create PowerPoints which they use in class but it is still useful to have the textbook open to learn all the information which they skip. Students usually avoid carrying around textbooks by leaving most of their books in their lockers at school for most of the year but this makes it hard to study outside of school. They also cram all their homework during studyhalls and copy homework from others instead of actually studying though.
My parents definitely didn't do that in the 80s/90s in the US. It might be a regional thing, though. It was basically the same where I grew up: the bus was how one got to school. If you didn't like it, ride your bike.
It was also easily the worst part of the day, so I can't blame parents from wanting to get their kids out of that.
Those who live in developments explicitly planned to leverage the fact that people have cars to spread them out further and give each family more land/house for the same money.
In these places, everyone who matters politically has a car, everywhere they want to go has parking, roads are huge, etc. so there is no political will for expensive transit, and the surface area is too large to cover effectively with cheap transit.
In my district (and all the districts around me) there is no busing for high-school students. So for the students that don't drive (Which would account for probably more then half the school), parents or someone else has to drive them.
There's only one district I know of, of the ones which don't offer busing for high-school students, which has a public bus that goes to the high-school. My district in particular doesn't have any public buses that go to the high-school.
What exactly are you proposing high-school students in my district do?
Perhaps I should have clarified, there are no buses/trams/subways or any type of public transportation in my school district for high-school students to take, because there is no public transportation period in my city. The only options for going to school are walk, ride a bike, or drive, and the first two aren't practical during winter - that's besides the fact that I lived three miles away from the school.
There's also the much-cited football problem: if high schools ended at a more reasonable hour like 3PM or 3:30PM, this causes problems for football coaches, who might see their after-school practices running to 6PM or something.
I'm reminded of how my school district carefully made sure that the austerity or budget-freeze budgets which happened when voters failed to approve their preferred budgets always just happened to not have enough funding for football...
> There's also the much-cited football problem: if high schools ended at a more reasonable hour like 3PM or 3:30PM, this causes problems for football coaches, who might see their after-school practices running to 6PM or something.
I checked my high school and others districts to confirm they operate on an 8 am - 3 pm schedule +/- 30 minutes. Is this uncommon?
I don't think any of the sports coaches I played for would have cared if practice took until 6pm. Sometimes it did take that long (or longer, until dark) except that after the state-limited amount of practice time an "optional" senior-led workout was what we told everyone we were attending. If we had more time before school, our light conditioning could have been a full-blown practice.
Here in Finland, schools start at 9 or 8 depending on schedule and end between 1 and 3 with enough time for Sport after. I think moving up school time would be feasible for US too. As an Exchange student during my HS years, waking up at 0515 was just insane.
Thanks for the PG article. Here's the money paragraph:
The problem is, the world these kids create for themselves is at first a very crude one. If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.
The last page actually pointed that out, as un-subtly as possible. Sure you didn't read the Cliff Notes? Or maybe didn't finish it?
Also, its not just kids. The Stanford prison experiment showed that. Also riots during power outages. Also the Serbo-Croatian war. Any time a breakdown of public order happens, folks all over revert to savagery.
Going a bit off topic here (since my kid is still in elementary), but I wish schools started later for more selfish reasons. Our kid naturally wakes up early but the Mrs. and I are night owls. We've been miserable since our kid started going to school. We've been trying to force ourselves to go to bed earlier than its natural to us, with varying degrees of success, but most weeks are spent half asleep most of the time because waking up at 7am just doesn't work for us. I can't wait for middle school when the kiddo will likely be old enough to wake up on her own, fix herself up and go catch the school bus.
Same here. I surfed the internet and played computer games until 1 or 2 AM every night, and then spent a lot of time in junior high and high school nodding out in class.
I really learned almost nothing, which isn't the fault of my teachers or anyone else. I would have been better off in a radically less structured educational environment, something as simple as being put in a room alone with some books and an offline computer for 4 hours a day, with long breaks in between to exercise and socialize.
Likewise for me. Upon starting college (and getting rid of morning classes), I found I slept better (and longer), had less migraines, and retained information better with less effort.
I have a pair of friends who met working third shift at a hospital. They got married and had 2 kids, who are 5 and 7 respectively now. It's still hard for them, one has moved to days out of necessity, but they both still function best as night people.
Kids seem to be normal enough and adapting. If anything, they're a little more independent than most kids that age I've met in the city.
It is absolutely ridiculous that we make growing humans get out of bed before 8 AM. Pubescent teens should be sleeping 10 hours a night, particularly boys who are in their growth spurts.
When I am emperor dictator, no schools open before 9AM.
But, then people will just stay up later. I know that's what I did as I went through schools / jobs. My last job I could get there around 1030am (wake at 9:45~) so I would make sure to get to bed around 2am.
Your personal experience doesn't comport with the findings of sleep researchers. Later work or school start times correlate with increased sleep. This is due to biological influences on behavior (people feel tired at night and go to bed.) To take your argument ad absurdum, if your job had started at 6pm, would you have gone to bed at 11am?
> To take your argument ad absurdum, if your job had started at 6pm, would you have gone to bed at 11am?
A lot of people that do shift work sleep and wake at odd hours. Also, during undergrad and grad school I tried to schedule nothing before ~2pm. I would sleep from 6am to 2pm. ... Not sure if any of this applies to high schoolers, though.
Was he tired all the time? It's been shown that shift workers never fully adjust to sleeping during the day. Children and teens need a lot more sleep than adults, so it's particularly hard for them. As a teen I worked in a bakery and later as a pastry chef, both of which involve very early starts. I loved the work, but that early alarm never got any easier.
I agree. I used to make the same mistake. Until I realised that it is best to go back to how people slept before electric light was invented; i.e. it is best to align your sleep cycle with the Sun's movement.
Of course, maybe it's harder to do this nearer the poles but, in the tropics we get near equal hours of day and night.
I have found sleeping early and staying away from modern tech 30-45 mins. before sleep to be _immensely_ beneficial.
Even at 60 latitude it is still possible to wake up durung winter if not after sunrise but at least at dawn if one can afford to wake up at 8:00.
For a while I had to wake before 6:00 and it really sucked at winter when sunrise here is after 9:00. This has little to do with the amount of sleeping. To my surprise I managed to switch to going to bed before 10pm. It is precisely waking up in the dark that was problematic.
I really, really tried to do that as a teen. I watched little or no tv anyway do that was easy and this was before the smart phone era so that wasn't an issue either. I would go to bed and lay in bed wide awake for hours, finally fall asleep, wake up, hit snooze seven times and drag in to class 20 minutes late. Looking back I honestly think I would have done much better in school and maybe even made it through college if I could have shifted my sleep schedule a few hours. I also firmly believe that that's really no one's problem but mine, so I'm not complaining, but my anecdotal experience suggests to me that some kids really would do better with later schedules a opposed to earlier bedtimes.
Your natural sleep/wake cycle is biologically determined and known to shift later into the night in adolescence.
Sending a teenager to bed earlier does not mean they will sleep well, or at all, in the period between "bedtime" and their natural sleep phase. The temporal location of sleep, not just its duration, matters.
Yes, adolescents undergo changes in melatonin levels due to puberty. This leads to delayed phase preference - teenagers naturally want to sleep from around 1 am to 10 am.
When I was a teen we didn't have television or mobile devices and I was still rarely asleep before midnight. What a mind-bogglingly simplistic perception of the world you have.
> When I was a teen we didn't have television or mobile devices and I was still rarely asleep before midnight.
So you stay up late at night and wonder why you barely wake up early in the morning? So shocking. Maybe because you stayed up too long the nights before?
There is a reason why people go with the natural day-night cycle. If you life a different life-style for what ever reason, feel free to do it, everybody has different preferences, but don't write BS and get personal. It's well known from various studies about shift workers that working a different cycle than the natural day-night isn't that healthy in the long term.
I think you will find the studies relate to placing different factors of a persons circadian rhythms in contention with each other.
Such studies show that the natural balance of the sleep portion of the wake/sleep cycle shifts towards 1-10 am for young men and becomes more resilient.
The "day/night" cycle is the external cycle that interacts only to tune the sleep/wake cycle. Suggesting that the sleep/wake cycle and the day/night cycle should be aligned, and that such is natural, is incorrect.
I'll link you some papers when I get home. However, in the mean time, I suggest you re-read some of those studies you are claiming to habe read.
You claimed that a removal of TV and mobile devices would solve the problem. Oh look it doesn't. How you can turn that into an implication that other people are being foolish is beyond me.
I guess I'm an outlier. I went to bed usually before 10:00 pm and got up early. I could change my schedule (for summer months, for example, I would sleep in).
But it meant I didn't know what happened on the cool TV shows and I couldn't see late-night (East coast). Not something I let bother me.
I think it's more about discipline than people give credit for. Farmers, arguably rooted in schedules that developed before electricity and TV, are up very early (even I had to adjust when I worked on a farm- but I did). We would get up near or even before sunrise so that we were ready to work when it got light.
So I agree with frik. I have a feeling this as much about discipline and self control as anything else.
My 16 year old home-schooled daughter wakes up at noon... By the way, where I went to school we had 7am (!!!) classes ... I used to sleep in and just skip them as a teen ;)
My personal schedule as an adult is to start working around 10am. Oddly enough when I am on vacation I tend to trend towards getting up earlier. If I need to get to work early for a meeting e.g. I tend to feel very tired the entire day.
I think some lot of this is related to how our sleep patterns are screwed up by artificial lighting. When we go camping we generally don't have fires and we go to sleep when the sun sets down and get up when it comes up. It all feels very natural after you've done a few days of that...
Try camping one full year in Ireland (beautiful country) and see how natural it feels to sleep 7 hrs in summer and 17 hrs in winter. And Ireland isn't even that far north.
What I have been wondering is, do later start times really help teenagers? I know when I was going to high school, if I was allowed to sleep in for an extra two hours, I would have stayed up two hours later at night. Meaning I got the exact same amount of sleep. Is this not common? Or does later start time actually lead to more sleep on average? Also, the homework load does not get lighter, so the amount of time they have to stay up to do the homework stays the same. The start time just shifts to later in the day. Is there any research out there that shows changing start times does anything other than shift the entire schedule in the day? With the exact same amount of time spent at school, time doing homework, sleeping, etc.?
The thing about sleep is, it's not a factual, hard science thing. Different people need different amounts. Different people feel better waking up at different times. Having a schedule and sticking to it makes you feel more refreshed. Hell, some people barely sleep and seem to be fine.
Personally, I can sleep 8 hours and still feel like crap having to wake up at 8AM. If I can sleep till 10, I wake up much more refreshed and immediately ready to start working.
In my mind, the only ideal solution for kids is a much more flexible schooling system that runs from the earlier hours to the later ones. Students would be able to select their classes (there's never THAT many in grade school) based on times that are convenient for their mental health and living arrangements. So Suzy could wake up and start classes at 8 and go home at 3, while John, who like me hates early mornings, could start classes at 10 and go home at 5. Of course, a bunch of organizational problems come up and let's not forget that anything run by the government is dreadfully inefficient, but in an ideal world, I think this kind of system would work.
Right, I am the same way. Not at all a morning person. I, don't want to get out of bed before 8, at the earliest no matter how much sleep I get. That is why having flexible work hours is important. Many of my co-workers have been at work for 2 hours before I wake up. But that's what they like to do. So nothing wrong with that. Having flexible school, at least for high school teens, would be a really interesting idea. Though like you said, scheduling issues would probably be too complicated.
> Perhaps more important, the number of car crashes by drivers 16 to 18 was reduced by 70 percent when school start times were changed from 7:35 to 8:55.
This is what stood out to me. I'd like to know more about how this study was done, but if it's valid this is one of the most compelling arguments I've seen for changing school start times.
I suspect it might also have something to do with letting all the rush hour traffic get to work first, THEN let teenagers drive around town. Whatever the root cause, if later start times are safer, all the more reason to support making changes.
Seattle Public Schools, for one, has taken this to heart and rearranged the schedule for next year. Elementaries now get the early starts, and the high schools will start at 9:35 AM.
As a late sleeper (and a high school student), i've found a way to make the 8am classes (waking up at 6:45) more bearable. I used to go to bed at 12 and was tired all the time since I did not get the 7 1/2 hours I needed. When I had classes late (twice a week, waking up at 8:15, 8:45 respectively, and going to bed at 1am), I still felt tired because I did not sleep much the days before.
What I do now is go to bed at about 2am and nap for 2 to 3 hours a day. Once I got used to it, it worked out great. I am not tired in the mornings at all and can make it though the whole school day. At 5pm, I start getting tired and that's when I starting taking my nap. At 9-10pm, after dinner, I start doing my homework for which I now have plenty of time and I'm not even tired.
That might not work for everybody, but I advice everybody to try out what works best for them.
I tried that when I was your age and it didn't work that great for me. I did it because I was just so tired after school that I crashed for hours when I came back. My problem was that I overslept (2 to 4 hours) during the nap and I felt so refreshed I wasn't tired until 2am. So I ended up sleeping only 5 hours for the night, pretty much like you. On the other hand, I was still tired during the day.
My point is that naps are good but at some point they're harmful for your night, and 3 hours is getting close. I believe it's better to keep at least 7-hour nights and have 30- to 90- minute naps. But the truth is that school hours are poorly designed.
My high school started at 730 am. They always gave bus scheduling as the reason they couldn't have a later start. Basically, the district only had so many buses to allocate for pick-ups, and would stagger start times to make sure the bus count was minimized.
"...but then, if that was true, couldn't we be scheduling half of the starts later in the day in order to stagger out the demand for buses even more optimally?"
As you can probably tell, I was not a popular child with teachers/authority in my high school days :P
I mean, it is a valid reason. My small town (4k~ people) did the same, high school started at 7:45am and each bus had both a high school / middle school route, and immediately after an elementary school route. Not only would you need twice as many busses, you'd need twice as many drivers. The cost difference is massive. That said, that doesn't mean they can't bump the start time of all the schools up an hour or two.
There's an even easier solution to that: IIRC elementary school kids are way more resistant to sleep deprivation than teenagers, so you can just flip the schedules around and start elementary school kids before teenagers. Downside is probably then that the more-demanding elementary school kids get home earlier, but I think they're already getting home well before the working parent does.
Our school system does this. I haven't heard any complaints about it. (And we have a lot of entitled parents who complain about everything else.) I'm surprised that more schools aren't switching.
I've heard that the reason this isn't the default is that parents get far more upset about making an elementary school kid get up and wait for a bus in the dark than a teenager.
I understand the arguments are made about the danger of standing next to a road invisibly (especially in shitty places with no sidewalks) but I'm sure some people are worried about kidnapping!
Heard that argument here when the idea was discussed. The funny thing is that these days (at least for Elementary school) there's always a parent or two who walks their kid to the bus stop and waits with them until the bus comes.
News flash: the educational system is utterly broken and still has old throwbacks to America's agrarian past.
Remembering when I was a teenager not too long ago, I could have told you the same. To this day, however, I am a night owl, which has also been shown to be more common in more intelligent persons,[0] so it really is a potentially more hard hitting situation to those brighter than average as well.
I'm currently a sophomore at Harriton High School in PA. Here's what my day looks like. Ideally wake up around 6:20, sometimes I oversleep to 6:40-6:50. Wake up, shower, breakfast if there's time (when I wake up too late, I'll grab some Clif bars on the way out). Run to bus stop, bus comes at 7:02. School starts at 7:30. 6 classes a day, an hour each. Lunch starts around 10:45. School ends at 2:40, sports start at 3:00. Sports normally go until 5:30, occasionally 4:30. I go to bed around 11:30-12.
Let's not even talk about the fact that educational system is extremely inefficient and is prone to wasting student's time. One would think that after spending 6-8 hours a day for 12 years that you'd come out somewhat knowledgeable about something.
You understand the global history since the neolithical times rougly, and your own contintents history since the 1500s pretty exactly.
You understand how algebra, analysis, stochastic work, and can do simple mathematical proofs.
You know the laws of physics, how and why things work, you have learnt general and special relativity, and even know parts of quantum mechanics, including being able to work with the probability functions of electrons.
You know basic chemistry, understand what each element is, know a large part of organic and inorganic chemistry, have experimented with it, and can explain why some molecular bindings work, and why some don’t.
You speak fluently 3 to 4 languages, and can read standard literature in them, as well as being able to write essays about cultural topics in them.
You have had PE, know how to play a majority of sports, and have a physical condition where you are able to play them.
You know the historical styles of art produced, and when and where they were produced, and have experience working in a majority of styles yourself.
You know how our political system and our economy works, and know how to do accounting and taxes for yourself. You know how to start a company, and the trade offs of different types of incorporation.
You are able to work in teams, can delegate work, know how to learn things from existing sources and do your own research, how to write scientific papers, can debate with others in a civil way.
________________________
Excerpted and translated from the curriculum for high school students in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, 2012.
(And I can attest that what I learnt in school fits this description)
I paid attention in a US high school, I'll take a crack at this list.
History, yes. Algebra and basic proofs yes. Basic physics were covered, but no calculations were ever done with relativity, and no quantum mechanics.
Chemistry covered the elements, molecular structure, and several dozen compounds. The Krebs cycle was roughly covered in biology class, but most organic chemistry went unexplored.
Language classes were enough to half-learn one beyond English, and not to fluency.
PE yes. Art history no.
The mechanism of government was very well studied, but politics were largely ignored. The economy was not a subject of study except for a bit about the Great Depression. Accounting was barely mentioned, and definitely not taxes or incorporation.
Teamwork? It was practiced, at least. Research and debate? Yes, pretty well.
That doesn’t sound nearly as bad as the media and other HN and Reddit users always claim it to be. In fact, sounds like an average high school in most of the developed world.
That leads to the question: Why is the US education system always portrayed like that?
It varies wildly. For a student who's motivated, encouraged by parents and peers, and lives in at least a reasonably middle-class or higher school district, you can come out of most high schools having achieved most or all of the things you listed. If you're poor, live in an impoverished district, are surrounded by family and peers who do not value education, and attend dilapidated schools with few resources, it's much harder. Those are are the schools thats are sensationalized, but they're mostly an artifact of inner city urban areas, and are more a reflection of the overall culture of poverty than a cause of it.
This roughly matches what is expected of a high level student in The Netherlands. Note that The Netherlands (and I think Germany as well) segregates students with a learning aptitude test.
This means for example that my sister who is more artistically talented than I am was sorted into the high school track that is shorter, teaches only the very basics of these topics. Her highschool track ends at 16 and students are expected to go into a college that teaches some kind of physical skill, she did graphical design, and after that got accepted into an academy of arts.
In contrast I went to the highest highschool track, did everything parent post mentioned, did that until 18 (6 years) and was then expected to pick a higher learning college (which we call university) to which you are generally automatically accepted if you have a higher learning high school diploma.
I often wonder how the US deals with this. My sister would be severely unhappy at my highschool being constantly confronted with topics that would be hard and uninteresting to her. I would likely be bored and vastly unqualified for proper university if I went to hers. How would you put us in the same classroom? ( though I would have loved to go to the same school as her, she rocks :) )
While I wouldn't say I learned all of this, we did cover quite a similar set of topics during my schooling. It's not everywhere that schooling is bad in the US. Not every school just lumps all of the kids no matter their aptitude into the same classes. A lot of schools have many levels of placement that are to help understand the baselines a student can be held to. For most math and science classes I took the top classes and felt it was a great pace (most of the time) and learned quite a bit. For history and English/grammar classes where I'm not as strong, I took a middle level class and still learned much of the same material but at a slower pace.
For cases like your sister, there was options for classes to be taken. She can take many different art classes over the course of a couple years to help build a portfolio for submitting to colleges. I on the other hand had 2 maths, 2 sciences, and an English class my final semester. It was great since it so closely aligned with my college studies and helped me get ahead (AP). I never felt difficulty in college having taken these APs either.
Just setting the record straight, it's not the complete Wild West over here. Just some schools are stronger than others. My school is pretty standard as far as schools in south east Massachusetts go.
Cool thanks! Just to clear it up, I didn't think it was a complete wild west out there. Clearly the U.S. has many of the best universities in the world, and similarly many of the best arts academies so somehow it's able to produce well prepared students. I was just a bit confused on how exactly.
To a large degree, the competent US high schools do that sorting within the school.
In my 4-year public high school there were at least 10 different math courses. The lowest students would still be taking some remedial arithmetic and such, normal students would take algebra, and I was taking discrete (first year).
This applies for pretty much all study areas, with AP/advanced options available for the best students and remedial courses for the worst. There's also a large degree of flexibility in choosing your schedule, so students who aren't planning to go to university could choose mostly shop classes and have half days for their final year or two of high school.
The end result was that I wasn't in a single class with the remedial bullies from elementary school (where unfortunately there is substantially less segregation, with the only solution being to move up a grade).
Almost no one graduating in the US would have even one of these skills, except possibly "knowing how to play a majority of sports." Most people graduating college wouldn't even have more than one or two of them, if any at all.
I don't know how you can make such a ridiculous assertion.
The vast majority of students at my public high school definitely graduated with most of those skills. I didn't go to a particularly special high school, just a normal public school in Vermont.
See my reply to tlunter[1], particularly link #4. Vermont is around the second best state in the U.S. education-wise and has a school system which is globally competitive. The U.S. is a giant country and there is a big difference between the best performing and the least performing states - e.g. between Massachusetts/Vermont and Mississippi/Alabama.
I don't think it's particularly controversial to say that most high school graduates in the U.S. are not fluent in 3 or 4 languages or able to solve problems in organic chemistry and quantum mechanics. This is, after all, a country where merely teaching the theory of evolution vs "intelligent design" in public school is still considered controversial among the general public, and people have trouble locating the countries they've recently spent a decade at war with on a map.
While I agree that Vermont is generally pretty good, I don't actually think it's that far outside the median. For example, in the US News ranking you linked to, Vermont is ranked 18th. [0]
That being said, I do agree there are large inequalities in education between states. I certainly don't think most US high school graduates are fluent in 3 or 4 languages. Heck, I'm not.
But that's a far cry from claiming that "Almost no one graduating in the US would have even one of these skills." Some large states actually have decent enough education that I'd expect their students to at least pass half the skill list.
The languages are the only point where I disagree with GP. Most US students don't start studying a foreign language until junior high at the earliest. When I was in high school (early 1980s) very few started foreign languages before high school. There were definitely kids at my high school who were pretty fluent in one non-native language, a few might be conversationally passable in two, but very few if any would have fluency in three or four languages in high school.
I think some resentful high school students that had a hard time often reflect American schooling poorly. I didn't have a supremely negative time (with the teaching at least) and I went to a standard 8:00-2:30 school in Massachusetts that had hour long blocks. I think we need to start taking more negative responses on the Internet as the extreme and not necessarily the norm.
Massachusetts seems to be consistently ranked as having one of the top public school systems in the US.[1][2][3] That might explain part of the discrepancy between your experience and my own.
(Edit: In fact, it seems MA would be pretty competitive globally against other country's schools - 9th in math, 4th in reading, 2nd in math. On the other hand, the worst U.S. states are on par with Bulgaria and Kazakhstan, among others.[4])
I'm not sure how to concisely respond to this as explaining everything right or wrong with U.S. public schools would be tall order. At the same time, it's likewise hard to believe your list would be the expected knowledge at graduation of a median high school student rather than a top-tier one.
For one thing, most items on the list wouldn't even be covered by U.S. standards (i.e. Common Core). Speak 3 to 4 languages fluently? The requirement to graduate in my state was 2 years of a foreign language (my school offered Spanish, German, French, and Latin, but options vary from place to place). Even assuming two years of a 55-minute a day class, 180 days a year, was enough to become fluent, that would leave you with two.
Similarly for science, you're required to take some basic science classes - intro chemistry and biology were the only required ones at my school. You wouldn't touch organic chemistry unless you took an AP (advanced placement, for college credit) class, and the teacher decided to cover it. I did take AP Chemistry and received college credit - we still didn't touch anything from organic the entire time, and I couldn't have even told you what a functional group was when I finished. Physics is just an elective and calculus-based wasn't even offered at my high school, so the majority of students aren't taking it.
Understanding special relativity? Quantum mechanics? General relativity? The highest math requirement is algebra 2, which might include a brief intro to how to add and multiply matrices. So exactly what level of "understanding" are we talking about this hypothetical median high school graduate having, in any country? General relativity is advanced enough that most physics majors won't even cover it beyond a superficial introductory level. You'd need a decent understanding of differential equations, linear algebra, and tensor analysis to tackle that kind of stuff, and the highest students could ever typically go (without the administration bending over backwards for a few particularly bright ones) is AP Calculus.
So I really have trouble believing the list of expected knowledge described in the GGP is anything other than a wish list for the best students. U.S. public schools may not be great but even I wouldn't criticize them for not meeting those standards for typical students.
That aside there are some real problems. Where I graduated HS, about 15 years ago, things were divided into the Honors program and Vocational program. The honors program was where you basically got what we might think of as a normal high school experience, teachers actually expected at least a minimal amount of work from you, and the better students had the option of AP classes. The vocational program was for everyone else. I knew people in it who didn't turn in any work their entire four years of high school. The classes were made to maintain a reasonable graduation rate despite having to deal with a large number of students who simply didn't care or for whom everyone had very low expectations. Those students might take two years of Spanish, but they weren't expected to be able to speak or understand it in even the most rudimentary way. Forget about actually learning algebra or knowing how to "solve for x." Even at the community college I attended, there were students who needed some science classes to do nursing who couldn't grasp the concept of atoms being made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons, and therefore couldn't get credit.
This is just how it is for a large portion of the populace - the really bad cases are far worse. My girlfriend is currently a student teacher at one of the two lowest performing schools in our state. She has immigrant students (in junior high) who not only don't speak English, but can barely read or write Spanish either. It seems like about 15-20% of her students would simply fail if she didn't take steps to try and get them to the minimum passing grade. But would it be better to hold them in the 7th grade indefinitely? Or to pass them along to a higher grade despite having only rudimentary understanding of the material outlined in the standards?
I know one thing she has changed her mind on recently, with actually being a teacher, is that it's possible for every student to get an A. It would take massive interventions beyond what a few teachers are capable of to turn around students from poor, rural, impoverished communities, who sometimes have histories of assault and abuse, and who have been perpetually falling behind the ideal outcome a little more every year. For the really poor outcomes, or just the suboptimal ones, it's a lot more complicated than just "what do you do in high school all day long?" The cases of having students primed for learning but not given enough resources are far fewer than the ones where schools are taking disadvantaged people who have already fallen behind and trying to make the best they can of bad situations.
I'm no fan of the U.S. public school system, but even I can't blame it for not being able to get students up to those kinds of standards before graduating.
Having moved into an English speaking country at 9, school helped me become fluent in English. I also attribute my arithmetic skills to my schooling, the calculus knowledge immediately put to use in the computer game I was writing. I also more or less enjoyed my history lessons. It helped me better immerse in Age of Empires at night.
I disagree. My wife was home schooled and has huge gaps in history, science, math, and English. Most of which I learned in public schools.
While the public schools in the US need some work, many of the people I talked to that 'didn't learn anything' didn't want to put the time and effort into actually learning.
Instead, time was spent on complaining about the system.
I agree. The first schools in the US were founded in the 17th century, but public school as a place for learning reading, writing and arithmetic came only in the last 175 to 200 years as the model we are largely familiar with today. Before that, schools were church and community driven, with parents expected to fill in the math and reading literacy if capable. Agrarian life was a family business.
In modern public schools, children are age-segregated within a year of their birth dates, and a large portion of the day is spent on mundane administrative tasks such as lining up, going to your locker, moving classes, sitting down and getting quiet for a lecture or other class. I sent my first two children through the system against my wishes, but as a compromise with my wife at the time. I am now raising my youngest outside of the school system. People always throw out the 'socialization with peers' thing. IMHO, I think it is healthier for the child to socialize across the age groups - maybe a violin class with 40 to 60 year olds, a yoga class with 20, 30 or 40-somethings, play time with close-in-age children after they are out of school, or during the morning with other home-schooled children. Right now I am living in East Java, Indonesia, and my baby is being social with everyone in the village from other babies to 80 to 90 year olds. I am originally from Brooklyn, NY (born and raised), and could easily do the same thing there, especially nowadays with more 'outside of the box' parents than when I was raised there. Home schooling used to get a bad rap because a lot of fundamentalist religious parents wanted out of the public school system. I am an atheist, so this does not apply. I don't think you do any great harm either way with school or home schooling; it's a personal choice. I just feel it is more of an easy thing to do. And, no, I am not independently wealthy. I grew up poor, and I have just decided to live life a bit different to accommodate my family's values, which sometimes means minimal living, but not skimping on fun and creativity and activities which abound in many places if you just look.
Crazy to me there's no precedent to talk of stress and sleep together. The word stress doesn't appear in this piece.
Stress and sleep are the same physiological system. The best way to recover from stress is to sleep. Not surprisingly, increasing stress also inhibits memory, learning, and attention. So by driving a stressful lifestyle with few hours of sleep, students are working against the need to strengthen the brain. Sleep literally seems to refresh us, consolidating new memories and washing away built up toxins.
Let's assume that everybody has his own natural sleeping schedule (so also teeangers). With ubiquitous internet why can't one stream the school lessons via internet from home so that everybody can start his/her schoolday when he wants to and only comes for the tests etc. or school activities that involve personal attendance (this could easily be scheduled on afternoon).
This could also probably reduce the wasted time of going to school and going home, if you only have to go their where personal attendance is necessary.
Because school isn’t a streamable activity, and hasn’t been for several decades.
School today works in a way where the teacher doesn’t teach the students things directly, but where the students try to explore and understand themselves in small groups, with the teacher only giving hints.
This technique started in the applied sciences, where the concept of giving students a task, like "find out what this material is" (chemistry), and letting each group then design an experiment on how to test it, and then – after they succeeded or failed – letting each group present their results to the others.
Nowadays, it’s used in almost all classes, from language classes to math, from PE to compsci.
Streaming such classes – which are the majority in todays schools – would be an impossible task.
EDIT: Again, if you downvote, please comment why you did so – an open discussion is always better than just plain downvoting, as it helps understand why you disagree.
Even if we accept you premise that all classrooms work that way (which is not a universal truth)...I don't see why that would make streaming impossible. On the contrary, it would make it easier. Self-paced exploration online, with collaboration with a teacher or peers as needed. If lecture-style teaching is appropriate for a topic, it can be recorded and streamed, and the student could always pause it, replay, or ask a question in realtime before moving on in the video.
FWIW, Not only is streaming education possible, it is already happening in the home-schooling world, and k12.com comes to mind, which is driving online education in public and private schools. Trust me, I attend educational trade shows, and I see increasing number of vendors in this space. And yes, some of this is moving to the traditional classroom, but we are a few years off of it being common.
All of these things require working with others in groups, physically.
You can’t work on an experiment in chemistry or physics or biology via streaming together (aside from the fact that buying all the required materials is a financial impossibility).
How is playing an excerpt from a theatre play in groups possible online?
Almost all language and scientific education requires direct interaction.
> it is already happening in the home-schooling world
Which is something that most nations have declared as "not properly fulfilling the right to education of the child".
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I’m seriously questioning how you propose kids do scientific experiments or do theatre plays, etc in groups via online education.
You have a valid point that some subjects do require interacting in real life. Good thing I never claimed that ALL education can be handled online, and was just showing that some education can and does happen via online streaming, and it increases every year.
As far ALL things require physical interaction... no. That is simply untrue. Some do, not all. You gave valid examples of some that do, and I agree with those. But you are approaching this discussion with absolutes and tossing the word "impossible" around enough that I want to respond with quotes from the Princess Bride.
This is certainly in line with everything that's come out of physics education research over the past few decades. (I'm a physics prof, and I try to pay attention to this stuff.) Passively sitting back and listening to lectures can actively hurt student learning (if you ask students how confident they are in their knowledge of physics right before a lecture-style class and then again immediately after, it gets worse). In a head-to-head comparison of exam results between one section of a class taught by an award-winning lecturer and another taught by two first-year grad student TAs trained in active learning techniques, the active learning students won by a mile.
It’s even worse in high school and middle school, because students creativity, interest, and ability to understand are severely hurt from just sitting back 7 hours a day and memorizing everything they hear.
In university, we always have for each course each a lecture (which is pure "listen and learn") and a lab (where we have to do things ourselves in groups, show the others our results, solve things together, etc.).
A lab and lecture for each course, 4 courses per semester. And it’s a pretty good combination, we get experience with practical stuff, and can learn better, but we also get to hear specific details in the lecture we might have missed if we had only done the lab stuff.
As far as I know, this education is standard here in northern Europe, and has been for as far as I can remember – but then again, I’m only 19 :D
That's something I'm still trying to wrap my head around since I moved to the US. Some classes start before 8am, sometimes closer to 7am. This is insanity.
When I see the school bus picking up kids in my neighborhood at 6.45 I feel so sorry for the poor bastards. A buddy once told me that they start so early because they need the buses later for little kids.
And it has other bad impacts. They most likely get breakfast around 6am. How can they keep it together until 12pm? So of course, they snack on a bag of Cheezy Poofs in the morning. Doesn't help with good eating habits.
I am under the impression that even if you move the start times back eventually the teenagers would adopt to it and they would still have insufficient sleep.
Perhaps school six days a week with shorter hours for more days per year? Or just full year schedules with shorter days as you increase in grade?
Schools cannot adjust for the schedules of their students times simply because there are too many variances. Start times will simply be followed by changes where the advantage wanted gets lost
So if schools start later, what about all those high school students that have jobs? Because, you know, some families rely on that income. This has always been the reasoning I heard for starting high school so early.
How very convenient that we have schools as a catch-all scapegoat for everything that is wrong with society. I'm sure teachers are enthused about getting lots of tips by armchair experts about how they should do their work.
School is an institution that occupies every child full time from age 5–18. Even when they're not physically in school, school dictates the structure of their life.
So nearly all of our population experiences their most impressionable, value forming years under the influence of schools, which almost all operate in a similar way. You'd expect this to have a profound effect of behavior, on the level that religion can have. So yes, schools make for a good "catch-all scapegoat" because the impact that they have on society is so large that for any given problem with society, you can probably find a quite reasonable causal link from schools.
The term "armchair expert" is used to make anti-intellectual arguments. It's usually not hard to tell the difference between someone arguing a carefully considered position and someone who's just hastily defending their ideas against new information, or whatever it is that people do. Don't lose the signal in the noise. If you don't consider any of it signal, then there's no reason to be in this thread.
But it's not like teachers are especially qualified in this area. Some are because they consider it a professional obligation to keep up on such literature and have an informed opinion on the issues the encounter, others simply because they're naturally inclined to care about these matters. But teachers in the US only need a bachelor's degree and a teacher's vocational training. Having a bachelor's degree doesn't make them any more qualified than the average HN commenter, and the vocational training typically doesn't bother with child psychology or pedagogical philosophy. The only factor that makes teachers any more qualified to speak on this than HN commenters is their lived experience working as a teacher. Such experience is subject to bias, for example, selection bias favoring the way thing are because the ones who disagree never became teachers or got fired. More importantly, though, it's not very exclusive experience. Everyone has a reasonable amount of experience with the education system from their 13 years in it as a student. People also get to experience working with children from an adult perspective when they become parents.
Why did you bother having a child then? Really? You're excited until they wake up by themselves, get ready and go away? So what's the point of their life and yours intersecting? A few minutes after school to say 'hey' before they go off to do homework and sleep?
I appreciate that not everyone can do this, but my wife and I home school our daughter, and one of the very things we talk about is that we're glad we don't have to wake up earlier than our bodies need to get the child somewhere. That's not the main reason we home school, but it's a nice benefit.
Edit: I meant to add that the main reason we home school is to get to spend the most amount of time with her as we can. It's such a precious time and I wouldn't want to see her gone most of the day.
This is unduly personal and not in the spirit of civility which is supposed to govern this site. In fact it's a downright nasty response to cesarbs's perfectly cordial comment. Please don't post like this. If you'd left (or edited) out the first paragraph, the comment would have made your point without putting someone else down.
By the way, @dang, is there a specific amount of karma after which I can post comments more often?
Most of the time I get questions as comments to my comments, and can’t answer them because of "You are submitting too fast".
So I type my answer to that comment, leave the browser tab open, and wait an hour to submit it.
This obviously makes discussion with others quite problematic, and I’ve even thought about starting a second account just to be able to answer other comments with less than a few hours delay.
(Ironically, this comment was also posted in a similar way: I wrote it 2 hours before posting, but had to wait again and again for the "You are submitting too fast" to end).
I think that's harsh, smacks of competitive parentism, and dismisses the value of sleep. You can love your children but struggle with aspects of their behaviour, and you certainly can't predict what they're going to be longer before they've been born.
Every parent I know loves their children and is delighted with them, but they leap at any opportunity to spend time without them. A night out with adult friends while the kids sleep at the grandparents' is a luxury to be seized. Not quite what the previous poster was getting at, just another data point in the complex relationship between parent and child.
I appreciate much of your sentiment, we've used some flexischooling when we've been able: but your emphasis leans towards children being there to fulfill you rather than the reverse (or probably more correctly a balance of both).
There is a spectrum of characters in children, some don't respond well to homeschooling (or other non-school based education). Moreover, some parents don't have the knowledge, imagination or general wherewithal to be directly responsible for aspects of their child's education.
Children are also for society as a whole, as much as continuation of the species is considered a moral and necessary good! Even if you can't see them all the time there is still good reason to be involved in their being raised, educated, integrated in to the future of our species ... we could perhaps plan it all a bit better though.
> Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers. They would be in the way in an office. So they drop them off at school on their way to work, much as they might drop the dog off at a kennel if they were going away for the weekend.
Schools are government-subsidised daycare first, educational institutions second, which is the reason they often fail at teaching students but rarely fail at keeping them in place.
From that perspective, why would you change a child's school hours to anything less compatible with their parents' work hours? If anything, I would expect the trend to be towards longer hours at school, perhaps by more tightly integrating after-school activities.