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Comment by renjimen | Hacker News Reader

They could push the school start time back. It would be better for kids everywhere, not just Scotland.

I figure it will not be easy to change the school start time, since parents are also need to change behavior with the school start time change.

In the end maybe this will be easier to just have a consistent schedule to change the school start time. In the end we invent DST again.

It could go hand in hand with more flexible working hours for parents. Admittedly not possible for all jobs, but something to strive for in most

Alright, in order to not have to change the clocks we'll need to usher in massive societal changes that will be annoying to everyone for some hard to quantify greater good.

Changing the clocks twice yearly is disruptive but keeping it only in the northern reaches of Europe so that children can walk to school in the winter light is even more disruptive.

You can’t have everything but at least you can use the changes to move towards a society where kids get up later and parents can work more flexibly. You need to start somewhere. Or are you disputing the benefits of more sleep for children and flexible working for adults?

Annoying for everyone? Talk for yourself, I'd love some flexibility when it comes to job hours, and I'd love my kids to start school later in the mornings.

Jobs should accommodate to people's lives, and not the other way around.

It really would not be difficult to move school later - school hours are already out of sync with 9-5 of 9-6 or the other hours parents work, if anything it’d be welcome.

Of course it would. School starts at roughly the same time as normal work hours. Most schools start a little before here to allow parents get to work after dropping off their kids.

You couldn't just change school hours in isolation without causing a lot of disruption.

School hours are 9-3:20 where I live, so they are nowhere near in line with working hours as you need time to get to work and not many jobs finish that early. Most schools run breakfast clubs and after school clubs as a result.

School began at 7:50 am for us. So that time worked well for parents and 9-5 sort of times. It gave enough room for 8-4 or 8-5 parents and long commute parents. Or parents who want to drop off and come back home first. If you make the school start time 9 am as well, if a parent helps their kid get ready and/or has to be around until the kid leaves for the bus and/or has to drop them off, they wouldn’t be able to unless their commute is short.

I don’t think school times can be pushed much. Maybe 30 min max without seriously disrupting parent’s schedules if that’s a concern.

> In the end we invent DST again.

But without many of its cons :)

Having a patchwork of moving schedules across society, from schools to businesses to recreational activities is far worse than the inconvenience of simply changing your clocks twice a year.

Interestingly enough, this is exactly the case in many parts of China; schools and organizations have a summer timetable and a winter timetable. I have never found this to be inconvenient, it's kind of comparable to shops having different open times on different weekdays.

Disagree. Not disrupting my already fragile sleep schedule twice a year is worth it.

I mean, if your work hours shift to deal with school time changes your sleep schedule is going to be disrupted anyway…

Why is your sleep disrupted by DST? Why not start and end sleep at hours that fit both summer and winter time?

It's your choice if you want to adjust your sleep hours to DST, you don't have to.

You must mean push the school time forward? pushing it back would just mean they spend more time in darkness.

I'm being needlessly pedantic (sorry) but "back" and "forward" in time is a confusing concept best thought of in terms to "traveling back in time" (decrement your clock, move to an earlier time) "traveling forward in time" (increment your clock, move to a later time).

Saying "push back" is a very confusing phrase to me because I don't actually know what you mean and need to pick it up from context clues which are not always right.

It seems correct to me. I found a good analogy on a StackExchange answer[1]: pushing 'back' means pushing something away from the current point in time. Bringing 'forward' means bringing it closer to the current point.

So 'pushing back' school start times would mean that school started later in the morning, when it was lighter.

[1] https://english.stackexchange.com/a/157003

Isn’t it confusing either way? Pushing school forward sounds right to you, but to me that sounds like making the school times earlier. It’s a bit uncomfortable for me to imagine it meaning the opposite. Obviously I’m saying that light heartedly but pushing back is what sounds natural to me. Like “push back a meeting”.

"spring back fall forward" isn't much help either since you can fall back as well as forward

So kids can go to school one hour later, so they'll stay in bed one hour longer. But this means that they can go to bed one hour later?

This means we'll do the DST switch anyways, but without changing the clocks. Nothing gained...

Changing the school time would wreck havoc on a host of other things.

And changing everything time doesn't?

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