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Comment by emerongi | Hacker News Reader

My opinion on school, coming from someone living in Europe:

- Homework should be abolished

- School should start at a reasonable time. In my opinion, 8AM is too early. Kids that live far away have to wake up at 6AM, which is not a normal time judging by when kids wake up during summer break (9-10AM). 9AM would be acceptable. Not sure how much it would affect teachers' lives though.

- Kids should be made aware of the psychological help they can receive if they have personal issues. We had a psychologist at school, but I don't think anyone consulted them.

- Kids should be taught practical life skills over random trivia. Housework (fixing things, cleaning etc), finance, time management, how to actually learn/study effectively, mental health awareness, working out with correct technique and not ruining your body, how to eat healthily are all things that I value more than knowing the intricate details of how the European Union came to be (knowing history is useful and interesting, but I'd have rather spent that time on the aforementioned things). Of course, a lot of kids are going to complain many things in this list are boring, but they will value them once they grow older. PE in my school didn't teach any theory, which is just stupid looking back. Our body is with us for the rest of our lives, we should have the knowledge of how to take care of it.

Also, certain degree of freedom is something that everyone wants and values in their life. It would probably be expensive and hard, but if possible, I'd try to give kids a way to choose a small part of their study path.

View on HN

Also living in europe:

> Kids should be taught practical life skills over random trivia.

This is parenting vs schooling, ignoring the fact that many schools are really glorifed babysitting services.

And more importantly, history isn't "random trivia". While the merits of a degree in history may be debatable, if the majority of the UK had a passable knowledge in why the EU exists, and what the UK did to become an empire, the attitude towards integration with the EU would likely be very different.

> PE in my school didn't teach any theory, which is just stupid looking back.

PE is the bare minimum amount of exercise and movement a child could have without being considered "entirely sedantry". For many kids it's the _only_ exercise they get.

> And more importantly, history isn't "random trivia". While the merits of a degree in history may be debatable, if the majority of the UK had a passable knowledge in why the EU exists, and what the UK did to become an empire, the attitude towards integration with the EU would likely be very different.

As much as I agree with other points, I can only strongly disagree here. It strongly implies a condescending attitude that stupid and uneducated decided about British future. If only they could be brainwashed^H taught they would choose the “right” option.

Well, I strongly disagree with you strong disagreeing.

It's not condescending in the slightest, and debate around Brexit revealed that although theres's nothing wrong with being against european integration, a lot of people have almost no idea of what the EU does and does not do.

I never claimed brainwashed, uneducated or stupid. Far from it. But many major important parts of british history are glossed over. Much of the empire is taught as though britain was a trading partner rather than brutal occupier, the Irish plantations are glossed over as an unavoidable famine, ww1/2 are celebrated as the strength of the empire, and the postwar agreements and decisions which led to the current EU are mentioned in a sentence. These are massively important periods which directly explain huge parts of britain's "influence" over the rest of the world, and the information is available quite publicly, just never taught to children.

If people at large understood what happened and why we have the institutions we currently have, they are shown to be far more likely to be in favour of them.

I wonder if you have really tried to understand the intellectual case for Brexit. Your 'if people at large ... ' is merely an exercise in wishful thinking.

For serious analyses of the Brexit question by extremely well equipped academics (I rather think they 'understand') and others try https://briefingsforbritain.co.uk/

It would be unfortunate here to mistakenly leave the impression that briefingsforbritain.co.uk is in some way neutral. Until the start of this year they used to be called "Briefings for Brexit". The content on the site is rampantly partisan. It would also be regrettable if one were to look at their academic qualifications as being somehow indicative of the quality of their arguments, rather than the quality of their rhetoric.

Well then there's not much E in the PE, is there?

I completely agree that the physical activity is important, but then let's not pretend that it's educative when it isn't.

I guess YMMV, because at my school (a long time ago) we learned a new sport each term. And it took the better part of the term for the average kid to achieve some level of competency, much like an academic subject. It's certainly different in nature than academics, but you still need to "educate" your brain to arrive at the correct movement, timing and balance for any sport.

I've moved past my bitter feelings about the failings of my sports education.

It feels like PE was 2-3 years of gymnastics followed by 6-7 years of "let's just play basketball/volleyball/soccer" with a semester of swimming here-and-there. Certainly no instructions or structure to any of it.

As a fat kid, I was always the happiest when sitting out entirely (or swimming, where it turns out natural buoyancy is actually helpful).

Always getting Ds and Fs and being chosen last for any team activity led to me spend my college years on the couch.

Only through getting back pain and posture problems I found out 5 years later that I enjoy jogging and yoga and weightlifting and isometric exercise - if properly instructed.

It feels like I missed out on the years in between simply because PE at school never had the goal of helping kids be healthy - just keeping them busy in any way possible.

If I had to guess, I'd bet that the majority of kids were happy to kick a football around, and the 2-3 that woild be happy doing something else (i.e us) were just outnumbered. As a teacher, would you rather have 2-3 kids complaining about soccer or 15 kids complaining about yoga because they've never done it?

This was at a school with 7 years of compulsory Latin lessons. It would, in fact, be very much in line with the general syllabus to make students do stuff (Yoga, Latin) which they didn't appreciate for their primary effect (flexibility/muscular health, general language understanding) until years later.

Physical exercise is an extremely positive adjunct to education, like providing healthy food, useful facilities (eg buildings).

Workspaces aren't educative, of themselves, but they're a pretty important facet of running a school.

Completely agreed with you there. That said, when I was 16/17, our school let us choose between a few activities (ball sport, racket sport, running sport or "other" - gymnastics, swimming, rowing, archery, horse riding). Had I had those options rather than just soccer aged 7 instead of 17, I would likely have been far more active in the years in between.

We were given a similar choice at that age (in Germany).

Due to all my previous negative experience, I chose to sort-of-quit PE altogether. It was impossible to actually quit, but you could compensate it with an equal amount of extra credit, so I happily replaced it with Arts credit.

Surprisingly, no one as much as batted an eyelid at that. The snobby attitude of "who needs PE anyway" was certainly prevalent in my age group.

There were three camps in my school - the "soccer is our life" group, the "who needs PE anyway" and the "I've got to go for a 10k run for my extra curricular sport anyway, might as well do it during school time" group. PE for 3 years just saved me having to do a run before school that day.

> PE is the bare minimum amount of exercise and movement a > child could have without being considered "entirely > sedantry". For many kids it's the _only_ exercise they get.

A study has shown that PE in schools have show it has zero benefits and only teaches some kinds to skip classes.

> A study has shown that ...

You'll need a slightly stronger argument to meaningfully shape this debate

> history isn't "random trivia"

The discipline isn't, but the way at least I've been taught it unfortunately is... It didn't take me until I graduated to take an interest in history, when I could learn the cause and effect chains without getting distracted by rote memorization.

Do you think what makes you interested in [topic] now would've been relevant when you were a child?

If I'm being honest with myself, my answer is probably no. "If only they taught _" for me, can be boiled down to "If only I was 30 in grade school"

When it comes to history... yes, there's a large overlap. The ancient times, the history of philosophy due to the development of ideas, the recent modern times due to their relevance to today's neighborhood politics, are three topics that I am constantly interested in. With the exception of ancient history (maybe due to the dearth of established dates), school had problems teaching me those.

There are huge problems with locking an age cohort with wildly different interests, talents, abilities, and personalities into a room and expecting them to go through puberty together while also learning... something.

Even if you select for ability along some axis, you still get different interests and learning styles - and personalities.

Learning is basically industrial, uselessly abstracted [1] and commodified, when it could be individualised. A lot of talent is wasted because high school stunts the really bright kids. And given how brutal it is, it seems to damage everyone emotionally.

[1] Virtually none of the math you learn at school really makes any sense unless you're one of the small number of people who go into STEM - which is where you finally discover what it's for. Things are a bit better than they used to be, but basic financial math as a specific competence is far more useful to most of the population than even the most basic algebra and trig.

Even so, I'm not sure it's useful for kids to memorize names and dates, as opposed to events and their impact.

The dates are important if the kids are to draw their own understanding of history. They can be told that X caused Y and just accept that the X came before Y, or they can learn the dates well enough to examine the situation themselves.

For instance: How long was WWII? How long was Vietnam? When exactly did WWII start, before or after US involvement? Knowing those sorts of dates allows students to put today's wars into context. Has the US been in Iraq longer than WWII? Longer than Vietnam? They can memorize the dates and answer those questions themselves. That makes them informed citizens, and some of them eventual informed soldiers, better able to participate in very relevant current events.

You know what would be useful? Take all those events and ask the children to put them in a time-line. Let them search any book they need in the process.

You know what is completely useless? Telling the date each happened on their respective classes, and that this knowledge will be tested.

I disagree that it is completely useless. You're basically arguing that time is only useful as a relative measure, not an absolute one. While that is true in some sense (the ordering of events and the space between them is what matters), because history is so vast and interconnected and a total ordering is desirable, it just makes more practical sense to learn the absolute date of an event, not just the "relative" date

That would have been nice, if students actually internalized the dates they've been taught.

Memorizing dates is as dull as it can be, without having motivation from knowing the context. Dull things get crammed for tests and then forgotten, with near zero retention when those people grow up and actually want to use the context.

Even if dates were more important than causes, they stick less, reducing the utility of teaching them.

In my history classes we were never quized directly on things as dates. However, you were expected to be able to use those in context. Example of a question: "Some historians consider the Cold War to be an ideological conflict that already started in 1917, argue why:"

This is so true for a lot of liberal arts. I just think the social sciences are better left until later in the child's life. Younger children are more adept at learning math and science than we give them credit for, but we spend quite a lot of time explaining dinosaurs really poorly only to never return to clear that up.

> spend quite a lot of time explaining dinosaurs really poorly only to never return to clear that up

I wonder about this type of thing a lot when I think of my experience in school. a lot of the material they taught me in lower and middle school was just wrong. not like subtly wrong, but blatantly incorrect in a way that would be obvious to any undergrad major in that subject (which schoolteachers often are). I'm sure the teachers must have realized too. why spend so much time teaching stuff that needs to be unlearned as early as high school?

the best example I can think of right now is the answer to "why is the sky blue?". my lower school science teacher told us it was reflecting the ocean. I'm sure she realized this answer didn't make any sense, but that's what she taught us. I don't expect teachers to try to explain raleigh scattering to a group of third graders, but wouldn't it be better just not to explain it at all?

Where was this FFS

this was at a very well-regarded private elementary school in the midatlantic US (I try not to be any more specific than this on HN, although you can probably figure out the city if you delve deep into my comment history).

I can understand teaching general rules upfront with the expectation that exceptions will be covered later (eg, teaching lower school students that water boils at 212F/100C is okay, they can learn about vapor pressure later). but why would you teach that columbus was the first european to discover north america? not only is it completely wrong, but it's not a practically useful fact, nor does it create a solid basis for deeper understanding.

Because it sounds right to a lot of people.

From experience, this must be true throughout the United States. I went to a very good public school and had similar experiences?

Blue light bounces around the sky a lot so we see it in all directions. At sunset, when we look at the horizon, we see light that traveled through a lot of sky without bouncing away, so it's less blue.

Who's Rayleigh?

You know, I think that many teachers honestly do believe the things that they teach that are totally wrong. My eighth grade science teacher said, with a straight face, that hydrogen bombs are so explosive because hydrogen is very reactive.

It's actually worse than that, because public schools typically teach the government-approved version of history. It's not until much later that, after digging into multiple alternative sources and triangulating what is likely a more accurate story, does one realize how much of the history you were taught was distorted or omitted.

It’s history abridged. Hard to cover 3000 years of civilization in depth across 6 contents from multiple perspectives. Someone has to choose what to cut

That's very true, yet what's often cut is the most recent, and also the history that paints the host in the least pleasant light. I had history classes for probably 10 years, and so much of it was ancient civilizations, and middle ages.

I always thought this was odd too. I started learning history in second or third grade, but we never got past the first world war until tenth or eleventh grade. even then, we devoted only a couple weeks to the entire 20th century. modern US history (ie, 1945 to present) was a senior elective, and there was no analogous course for world history. in a well-regarded private school, it was entirely possible to graduate without having the faintest idea of what has happened since world war II. to this day, I know more about what happened in cyrus's failed campaign against artaxerxes than I do about the vietnam war.

in a weird contrast, we spent tons of time on the civil war and slavery (and not just the sugar-coated version either). we learned about thomas jefferson and sally hemings, and we learned about andrew jackson and the trail of tears. so I don't think it was out of squeamishness that they declined to cover more recent history.

I suspect that anything in living memory of the people who approve the textbooks doesn’t look like “history” to them, and also runs the risk of being considered overly political— it can be hard to be objective about events you lived through, so any stance the curriculum writers take will be attacked by the parents and grandparents that were on the other side if the issues.

I think there's definitely some of that to it, similar to /r/askhistorians "twenty year" rule. older events/topics can still be very controversial though. I went to high school very close to the mason-dixon line. there were a lot of parents who believed the civil war was primarily about states' rights, and some were very upset at the school's coverage of the civil war and european colonialism/imperialism.

I get that schools (especially private schools) ultimately need to satisfy the parents, but it strikes me as a massive disservice that my peers and I were able to graduate high school without learning a single thing to contextualize the two defining current events of our childhood: 9/11 and the iraq war. the film charlie wilson's war was the best explanation I got until I was in college.

Envious. My memory of history class here in Australia was pretty much entirely about the history of Australia. We are not a very old country. And then half of that was about how we oppressed our native population.

I think it's actually worse that what's taught isn't even coherent.

Surely that is an indication that pedagogy should change, not that we should replace the discipline with something else. Especially when the "practical skills" people often point to are very much the sort of rote memorization things people complain about (budgeting, taxes, etc).

Somethings this is based on how a subject is taught, but other times I think this is simply maturity and focus. I have a much easier time reading through a dense book as an adult. As a kid, I couldn't sit still, I couldn't make myself care about the topic.

Although to be fair, history textbooks are often really terrible.

> This is parenting vs schooling

We (collectively) want all children to have a good foundation of life skills by the time they reach adulthood.

Unfortunately there is no curriculum for what a parent must teach their children.

Luckily, there is a standardized curriculum in the form of schooling.

Instead of assuming all children get good parents (which is obviously a harmful assumption), let’s just take advantage of the fact that we can pretty much guarantee all students will learn the school curriculum and use it to teach important life skills to children who otherwise wouldn’t learn.

Children only have a certain amount of time in school. We can't just keep adding subjects that everyone needs to learn. Kids already spend a massive amount of time in school and on homework, so something's got to give if we want to add to the curriculum.

Right, don't forget that we can remove things too, though

Life skills are not completely disjoint from current curriculum subjects. You don't need to dedicate an hour every day to a class called "Life skills" (and if you did I suspect many children would pay less attention).

Why not use that math class to teach personal finance, mortgage rates, basic economics, etc.

Why not couple English with a stronger focus on proper communication (especially negotiation, conflict resolution)

etc.

Teachers are given a document that says in X weeks you need to cover the following topics/units. Let's fix that document so that we can ensure everyone who graduates the public school system can confidently understand their credit card statement -- regardless of their parental upbringing.

I get your point, but the issue is that people don't grok the link between the fundamentals and day-to-day life.

> Let's fix that document so that we can ensure everyone who graduates the public school system can confidently understand their credit card statement

I'm pretty sure by age 14 my school math problems were along the lines of "John takes out a loan for $x, with a compounding interest rate of Y%, how much does he pay back in total?"

I agree that we could do better at teaching however!

> Unfortunately there is no curriculum for what a parent must teach their children.

I do not believe that having a specific curriculum is necessary to have a good foundation of life skills. In addition I would argue that the curriculum in schools is absolutely disappointing if this is the target.

> Instead of assuming all children get good parents (which is obviously a harmful assumption), let’s just take advantage of the fact that we can pretty much guarantee all students will learn the school curriculum and use it to teach important life skills to children who otherwise wouldn’t learn.

The issue here is that you are basically torturing these students that would end up learning (either due to their parents or to some other resource) regardless in order to improve the life of these that would not. I would understand your point however if school was not mandatory.

> ignoring the fact that many schools are really glorifed babysitting services

I think you need to face this fact to understand schooling in 2020.

In 2020 specifically quite a lot of schooling has happened with the kids being quarantined at home. It's been quite messy, especially at the margins, but it provides a sort of natural experiment on what's actually going on.

There seems to be huge resentment on this site over the fact that kids being in school allows one of parents to get employment. No, it really does not mean the babysitting is the only or primary function and it is definitely not something bad.

And if quarantine changed anything, it is that I value school more then before. And I am not one of those people desperate to somehow making remote school and work function, thankfully we had no stressful deadlines during that time. But the kids still missed it and still learned better when in school then home alone.

Well it's not a bad thing. It's just a fact that working parents need somebody to handle their kids for about 10 hours a day.

Yeah, all I'm saying is that pretending school is a purely education institution is awkward at best.

It's better if school policy can be discussed admitting it has two main purposes.

> This is parenting vs schooling, ignoring the fact that many schools are really glorifed babysitting services.

While this may exaggerate the case, it will continue to largely be true so long as we relegate huge portions of our population to 2-3 jobs while the VC system sustained in part by Ycombinator rewards capital formation to a degree that is damaging to society.

The previous two comments mentioned Europe, where "multiple fulltime jobs" is essentially unheard of.

Not multiple fulltime jobs, but in Germany there are 3.5 million people with multiple jobs (350,000 with jobs subject to social insurance contributions "sozialversicherungspflichtig"; 250,000 with "mini-jobs"). More than 50% in a poll give financial issues as the critical factor why they have multiple jobs.

I think multiple "fulltime jobs" is extremely rare.

Usually when people say they are working 2-3 jobs I believe they mean they get a couple of shifts a week from a couple of different employers.

E.g. 16 hours a week at a coffee shop, 12 hours a week at a restaurant and 2 nights a week as a cleaner.

That would sum up to one full-time job, more or less?

I understood the comment to be angry about some large injustice, I'm not sure whether they were meaning to essentially say "some people have to work for a living, it's outrageous". With (Western) Europe's extremely strong social systems, the number of people who are forced to work multiple jobs because they wouldn't be able to eat otherwise is minuscule, I believe.

The history curriculum really matters and it's almost impossible to generalise over. Mine was ok in the primary school and then degraded to "which army led by whom moved where (occasionally why)". Took me years to realise that if you learn more about the progress of wars than the reasons they started, it's worse than wasted time.

Physical Education is very much a “get out of it what you put into it” sort of thing, really like any class. And there’s going to be regional/world differences. It’s also partially there for the student athletes, in order for there to be job infrastructure and education/training. Source: father was a physical educator for 40ish years and is a good man

The financial education and time management lines really resonated with me from the parent comment. The problem is that there is not anything resembling equal footing at home. Rich kids, realistically the top 5-10%, are going to get financial education at home and the others will have to learn in the school of hard knocks. I had to learn “tough” lessons about finance because the resources for what I needed to know didn’t exist at home. And I talk to people now who are older about how they prep their kids for the world, and it’s just a classic information imbalance. You could do a lot of good by leveling the playing field here.

get out of it what you put into it

Physical Education wasn't my favorite class, but never once did anyone talk about the theory behind developing athletic performance or recruiting the proper muscles for a movement or anything like that. It was just "go run" or "play a game of baseball".

In my opinion, you can still get a lot out of PE just by doing it even with little instruction. Being made to play basketball will almost certainly develop team-working skills, hand-eye coordination, fitness etc, with no involvement from the teacher.

But I agree that there is some lost potential in terms of building a strong knowledge base about fitness and well-being. The paper below suggests there are likely a lot of moderating factors in the benefits of PE.

https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1080/02671520701809817

When 2008 happened I realised that my parent’s generation knows close to nothing about the modern financial system.

Meanwhile they prevent my generation from building houses and rob our pensions.

> This is parenting vs schooling, ignoring the fact that many schools are really glorifed babysitting services.

Modern school systems are pretty much entirely this... only they aren't really glorified. To be fair, a society in which every adult is expected to be working needs some kind of daycare for kids, but there are probably better ways to go about it.

History is not random trivia any more than math is memorizing random formulas.

If the applications of mathematics are not made clear, it is quite literally memorizing random formulas. Which is exactly the scenario you'd find in most public high schools in america.

Which, that sentiment applies directly to history.

Parenting vs schooling seems like a mistake to divide in that way. If everyone is expected to know it then it should be taught period, otherwise it is left to the "random" potentially lacking the abilities themselves let alone the ability to teach them.

> Homework should be abolished

As a child, and now as an adult, I've always thought homework was an insane proposition. If you had a job where you showed up in person for 7 (realistically more than 7) hours a day, but then assigned arbitrary multi-hour long projects afterhours, you'd quit, 1000%.

> In my opinion, 8AM is too early.

First bell for us was 7:18. Meaning the bus showed up at 6:30. Meaning wake up was 5:45.

Looking back, my four years of high school were probably the worst years of my life. I'm glad, at least for a brief minute, current high school students are getting some kind of reprieve.

My wife used to teach these ‘useful’ classes. They used to call it home economics. Now they call it family and consumer science. Essentially the same things. How to cook, budget, raise a child, etc. Sadly many school districts are cutting these programs to make room for classes that help the students do better on standardized tests. It’s sad because there were a ton of kids who used to find their life’s passion in my wife’s classes.

This isn't a 'new' trend. It has pretty much been happening since they couldn't simply teach women how to cook and boys how not to cut their fingers off in shop classes.

I am 42. I had less than 9 weeks of cooking. Part of that 'cooking' was cooking once a week, a cookie contest that almost got me in trouble because I didn't cook while home sick, and how to set a table for a formal setting (i've never used this). The once-a-week cooking was in a group setting. I had "financial education" in social studies class - taught by a car salesman friend of the teacher. We got extra credit if our parents went to look at used cars. I was in 8th grade: 13 years old at the time.

I had health class, which mostly taught us the parts of the body and sex ed over and over again. PE class at one point consisted of ping-pong for 6 weeks: I didn't learn anything that I could actually use in life - how to be do cardio, stretching, weight training, nope. Nothing like that.

Not once was I ever introduced to any sort of child development classes. You see, I took AP classes and had a full college prep schedule, so they didn't think these classes were important. Some others were so much better prepared than I was.

>taught by a car salesman friend of the teacher. We got extra credit if our parents went to look at used cars.

That seems super shady. Did anyone end up filing a complaint with the school board?

I'm not even sure if I told my parents, honestly - but I cringe when I look back on it (I was only 13, moved earlier in the year, and was already an outcast). I don't know how it was ever allowed.

The big problem with school districts is that they are so far down the chain of decentralized government that almost no enforcement exists to make sure the right decisions are being made. Almost every former teenager has a powertrip story involving a school official which is probably against some code or regulation; but the power imbalance between school employee and student makes it nearly impossible for those concerns to hold any weight. Students are also never informed of their rights except for a student handbook at the beginning of the year, and even then there's an implicit expectation that the teacher/principal/superintendent has the right to institute arbitrary rules at any point.

There are most likely illegal policies and activities taking place at every public school in the U.S., and it's not taken seriously because children cannot vote and many parents think the schools ought to be going hard on their kids anyways.

There's always the liability of knives, stoves, ovens, and hot oil, that never helps.

Although in retrospect it was perhaps a bit ridiculous that my cooking class allowed only a microwave, while I worked an open forge in metalworking.

... and now I'm just realizing the only fear I had of dangerous stuff like that in school was the soldering irons in the DT block. Never blinked once at being in the food tech rooms with those same people.

Abolishing homework will only lead to less knowledge transfer. Most teachers are not good, so self-study is essential. Teaching how to study is part of the curriculum on the schools I've seen.

Random trivia should not be taught, but cleaning and fixing? Next you'll want to teach morals.

> Next you'll want to teach morals.

We always have in many ways, but I catch your drift. I take issue with schools that teach kids what to think instead of how to think.

I don’t know if it is pandemic but I’ve seen some people complain about some very controversial curriculum creeping into schools. A person I saw on Twitter recently posted some curriculum their 1st grader was being taught which tells a story through the lens of critical race theory. In essence telling the children that the white kids are racist and need to work to be anti-racist.

It was shocking to me because it is applying controversial “Theory” that is very much opposed to liberal science ideals of falsifiability and injecting identity politics into minds that can’t even begin to understand the postmodern philosophy these ideas grew from.

The uncomfortably truth here is that kids will always be taught values. The question is who gets to decide what the "right" values are?

If most teachers are bad then using homework to fix this is a shit solution: why are children being forced to endure 1st the bad teacher AND the homework.

And more often than not, the teacher is the one creating the homework, so it ends up being just more of the same.

>> Most teachers are not good, so self-study is essential.

It's not even about teachers being good or bad. It's about something called "illusion of competence". Basically, everything seems easy while teacher is explaining it on whiteboard, but when facing similar task on your own, outside of the classroom you are completely lost, don't know where to start. Homework helps dispell that illusion.

Tests get the same result. It is better to regularly tell the kids to solve problems without help than to make them to do it at home, since many kids wont do it at home.

but homework gets checked by teachers, right? I mean, from what I remember from my own high school teacher would spend first few minutes of each class asking about homework, somethimes simply providing the correct answers, sometimes randomly asking a kid in class to provide an answer. It wasn't graded, so much less stress than taking a test, but still you could verify that your solution to the assignment was correct.

IIRC, there’s actually evidence that homework is negatively affecting learning for most age groups.

Can you post it? Because i only found this[0], and it says that good homework can be really helpful, but it should be more personalized and creative. [0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00098655.1996.10...

> Most teachers are not good, so self-study is essential

An excellent cowpath right? "The teachers are bad, so rather than fixing the teachers we make the students teach themselves afterhours."

Agreed. Self-study is the most important part in going to school and doing things yourself leads to it. Lots of intelligence self starters here on HN claiming homework is not essential because they were able to absorb the material some other way.

That's like saying you're a great natural basketball player and practice should be abolished.

Homework: What if we made 10-15 minute lecture videos for each class. Student would have to watch/take notes for 50 minutes at night. Then, in school, they do exercises together to practice, not just sit and listen. My favorite math class was 10 minutes of method demo and 40 minutes of practice questions: effective and relaxed.

Practical skills: History is useful, yes, especially for governance and historical equity. If Americans didn't know history well, more Southerners could get away with the false states rights narrative for the Civil War. But, on the whole, I agree we overly focus on literature and ancient history relative to modern skills, IMO.

I can guarantee you that, had this been the format, whoever I was assigned as a partner would not have completed the lecture video from the previous night.

I have had courses in this style before, known as "flipped learning". It works reasonably well in my experience, although it's much easier to fall behind if you have other obligations outside of school, and having to note down questions and hold on to them until the next class is awkward.

Shouldn't one learn the practical life skills from ones(?) parents? Isn't the problem they are not available anymore?

That's assuming the parents have those skills.

Yeah, parents are busy working all day. But also the parents may have never learned the skills or know how to teach them.

The idea of mandatory education is to guarantee that you're provided basic skills to have a chance to survive a thrive in society regardless of your environment.

Not to refute or acknowledge your point, but it makes me think of Those who can - do, those who can't - teach.

Such a disrespectful attitude towards some of the most important people in society. Disgraceful.

Professors teach, are they in that position because of some ineptitude? Of course not, the opposite.

On the whole university professors are terrible teachers. The concept of a professor wasting time giving a lecture to 100 people is surely at an end - far better to find the 1 in 100 professors who are good at teaching to record a lecture and give it to 10,000 people - where those people can pause, play it back as many times as they need, etc

This may surprise you but the reason professors teach is that they’re experts in their fields. Lecturing serves more purposes than simply educating, it allows immediate interaction over the subject matter as it is presented and intended. You are expected to show up at a lecture already knowing the contents, not as if you’re going to the cinema. This though is how people treat it.

While this is at best a very dubious sentiment, I've only really seen it applied to university lecturers. I don't see how it can reasonably be applied to primary/secondary teachers.

I think that's a fair point. But I also think that the education system should have a levelling effect, where it doesn't matter who looks after you when you are at home - everyone has the same opportunities to learn.

Students' parents, guardians, extended cohabiting family, etc. have an impossibly diverse range of skills (and ability to communicate, etc.). Even if these people were available at all times, they remain a hugely variable source. If we're saying that practical life skills are important, we should aim to provide a consistent experience to avoid inequality in society.

I'm sure everyone has stories about how the people who raised them taught them a few things well and were terrible examples of others. Some of these will be funny, but others can have life changing consequences.

Maybe one "should" learn those skills from ones parents, but I certainly didn't and I think the same is true for the majority of people these days.

Should the school system be designed for ideals that don't hold true, or for the real world?

That works if your parents ever learned practical life skills. Even parents who recognize they're lacking will struggle to pick those skills up.

Sometimes YouTube (or online courses) can help: https://www.youtube.com/c/DadhowdoI/

But sorting good information from bad is a skill on its own. People come up with all kinds of heuristics with varying efficacy.

> Isn't the problem they are not available anymore?

Eh, no; they're probably more available on average these days. Average working hours are down quite a lot in most developed countries, and far more people have regular scheduled employment (vs working on a farm or similar, which could frequently be every waking hour for most of the year). But the assumption that most parents either know these things or are good at teaching them is... optimistic, to say the least.

I did do a bit of cooking at school but I learnt much more by watching mum cook.

I was cooking some of my own meals from when I was 14 or so - Ok this was only simple stuff

Yeah. Same here. I made my first dish at 7-8. We had a mini stove and I cooked corn with bunch of veggies on it. It was fun. Afterwards, I learnt to do more complex stuff due to single parent household.

Homework is very important. It gets you to practice intrinsic motivation - getting things done in your own time when nobody is forcing you to do them and when you have other, more appealing alternatives.

Most kids only do homework because they'll be punished if they don't. That's not intrinsic motivation.

Most people only do jobs because they don’t want to starve.

I didn't know that was a good thing. That's a legacy bug in the socius.

Sure, but homework is preparing them for reality

Homeworks makes them accept it, which means it perpetuates it.

Even if preparing people to just put up with something miserable were a valid goal, it's exceedingly unlikely that just subjecting them to it for years on end is the most effective or the most efficient way to prepare them for it.

An entire essay on the subject: https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/getting-hit-head-lessons/

There's a lot of people who love their job; many more I would think than students who enjoy doing homework.

Homework has the extrinsic motivation of getting detention when it's not finished.

At what school did you not get forced to do homework? Because I would have liked to sign up there and not do any of it.

My local school didn't force me to do homework. It was always clear that I understood the material, and I could generally answer questions on it if tested. I think they had bigger things to worry about than whether I was doing the homework.

I did really poorly in school, also barely did any homework (lacked motivation) and at some point most teachers just gave up on asking whether I even did it. Somewhat miraculously, I still got my A levels. University is now going a lot better.

If anything homework let me practice my excuses and lying. Teachers and parents alike provide plenty of extrinsic motivation for doing even the most pointless of homework. If I hadn't found a passion in programming I likely wouldn't have developed any intrinsic motivation whatsoever, and that's a real problem.

Arguably, "excuses and lying" is also a useful life skill. Not necessarily for society, but certainly for the individual. Even if you never lie again after school, it's useful to be able to detect the behavior in others.

Suggestion: homework once in a while.

I personally learned nothing from homework, besides the anxiety that came with trying to make up an excuse for why it wasn’t done. I spent more time trying to avoid doing homework than actually doing it.

A big problem with school for me was that very little of it was framed in a way that made it seem useful. In subjects where I either understood the value (math for example, as I learned to program in my teens, so saw value in it to do things I wanted. While many of my peers followed the “it’s only useful if you want to be a math teacher” philosophy) or had some kind of extra interest in, I did well in, but even in subjects I chose to do, liked and was good at (eg German), I struggled trying to find the motivation to do any homework. Being forced to didn’t help, I would rather stare into space for an hour than actually spend the time on homework.

A big part of it, I think, was I needed downtime. I had already spend many hours in school and now was being told I needed to spend my time doing more school stuff? No thanks!

Even now, a couple of decades later, I need downtime to process the things that happened during the day. I’m a huge believer in Hammock Driven Development because of how important I feel thinking, reflection and downtime is.

EDIT: hell, I did really bad on one subject I used to be great at because of the homework: the homework load was too high so I dropped to the lower level class instead, which was the start of my downward spiral: it was too easy so I didn’t do much in it, the teacher didn’t push me and a few years later I struggled and never recovered. If the homework load were less, I would have stayed in the higher level class and, while I’m not certain, I’m pretty sure I could have at least maintained my ability instead of it deteriorating. I still believe I would have done better in my final exam at age 13 than I did at age 17 because of this.

For you claiming that math was useful there will be 20 claiming that math is one of the most useless class. And in the next sentence they will claim that school should teach practical things, like doing your taxes.

It all boils down to not wanting to put any effort in the end.

Is there actually a problem with not putting any effort if not required? Why isn't it a good thing to achieve a task with less effort?

Would you also say that programmers writing code on computers instead of pen & paper just "don't want to put any effort in"?

And? That doesn't go against what I said. I just said that a big problem is that subjects aren't framed in a way that makes them seem useful, regardless of if they are or not.

For me, homework was the time where I got to actually solve problems instead of wait till somebody faster yells answer. It was time when you could struggle and then realize that when you struggle enough, you can figure it out.

In the school during lesson, there is less privace as people look at you struggling and plus there is always someone to instantly nudge you.

People wont scream out answers during tests. Tests is the best way to ensure kids gets to sit and think about problems. Homework doesn't do that at all for many kids.

I strongly believe that tests are an underutilized way to teach. Many seems to believe that you can't learn anything during tests, that they are only there to evaluate kids. However actually sitting and thinking about stuff is really important and tests helps with that.

Tests typically have short time and there is pressure.

Tests are not place for individual problem solving nor for figuring stuff out, they are for when you already learned that stuff and is proving to others that you did.

Strongly disagree. It's not intrinsic motivation, it's fear of failing. That's a terrible lesson to instill in children.

I do agree that's a useful life skill, but that is really scraping the barrel for reasons why homework works.

The problem there is we can find examples where there is no homework and a functional, thriving society behind it [0]

0: https://www.bbc.com/news/education-37716005

IMHO the common practice of homework is maybe not completely wrong but executed incredibly badly. I remember one time where I was with a friend doing homework together. It was about writing a text. We were so incredibly bad at it, the texts were full of repetitions and missing the important information. How should a 12 year old know how to brush up his writing skills outside of school anyway? I ended up skipping most of my homework the rest of my school time. (This worked surprisingly well for most subjects and teachers.) Going to university was such a breeze in contrast. Clear instructions, self-contained lectures, references are provided so it's possible to drill into a topic either alone or together with others...

To me school is mostly about teachers checking on students instead of them actually explaining things. Once I was on a summer school in the Netherlands during university and I remember one of the professors saying that during the first 2 semesters they need the students to unlearn destructive behaviours from school. E.g. admitting when they don't know something and to ask. I'm from Germany but to me it seems like a problem occurring in many countries.

A part of the difference between college and elementary/high school is that most people don't want to be in elementary/high school while in college there is a lot more self-motivation. Learning is a lot easier when you actually want to learn and improve and you feel you have a personal stake in what is going on.

Problem is that homework is always forced.

Honestly, how many kids do you think would choose to study anything if given a choice?

While not perfect, Montessori seems like a good start to demonstrating that kids can choose to study.

The Montessori Method of Education, developed by Italian physician Maria Montessori, is a child-centered educational approach based on scientific observations of children. The method views the child as naturally eager for knowledge and capable of initiating learning in a supportive, thoughtfully prepared learning environment. It attempts to develop children physically, socially, emotionally and cognitively.[1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education

I think of Montessori as a smart middle ground between under-structured "child-centered" and over-structured traditional education. I've seen it explained as a triangle of child, teacher, environment, where the teacher spends some time preparing the environment, some time instructing the child how to interact with the environment, and some time making adjustments to the environment.

Love Montessori. Have you heard of Sudbury Valley schools?

I learned 95+% of things I know about programming outside of class. Now, I doubt that anyone would really lean a "well balanced" set of subjects, but students can be made to have their own intrinsic motivations to study things.

I think the formal classes like history are no problem and have a place in the curriculum.

Kids learn at different speeds so a good education system takes that into regard. Systems should be transient that slow starters can catch up at a later time and reach higher forms of education.

We need more teachers and smaller groups. Eating healthy can be a course, but you quickly loose all the pupils that already learned that from their parents.

Mental health is hard to teach and there is little certain knowledge here, it only works individually. Aside from really hard cases, I think children have quite resilient minds.

I believe the reluctance to do physical exercise has other sources, not really lacking education. But PE is vastly to be preferred to medicating "unusual" behavior.

Getting assaulted by another student does lots of damage to mental health.

Typical response By admin is to ignore the the Issue or minimize it.

In my school there was little physical bullying. I cannot remember any to be honest. Psychological "terror"? Plenty. I am actually not that old, but 15 years ago it was mostly parents that mediated conflicts. Children are ashamed to admit they are bullied in many cases, so you need good teachers to notice and speak to parents.

I cannot honestly condemn teachers that disengage though. Classrooms get bigger, bullying happens digitally and out of reach, teachers and parents are critical of each other and pupils are the first to notice if they have free reign and know pretty well how to profit from such conflicts.

> Kids should be taught practical life skills over random trivia.

THIS !

Cooking, Nutrition, Medicine, Drugs & Vitamins, Finance, Basic electronics etc. Practical stuff needed every day.

Most of this used to be on the curriculum - Home Economics and Craft, Design and Technology have gone out of fashion, but covered the practical things. My school had a vehicle workshop as well as kitchen classrooms. Oh, and a typing pool, too :)

This got me thinking - I wonder how much of that comes down to mundane reasons like budgets, rather than pedagogy. Change costs money and most schools are slow moving. For example, I suspect that the content of secondary school mathematics have changed little in generations, but the content of practical lessons in cooking, vehicle maintenance, finances, programming, etc. changes much faster.

A lot comes down to budget I think. Schools are judged mainly on standardized testing scores and funds will be allocated to ensure optimization of that metric.

Schools mainly get funded through local property taxes. If you compare curriculum in towns that are generally middle and upper middle class with towns that have a larger lower middle class population you’ll probably see different curriculum. More AP classes, electives, life planning, etc.

The town I live in has pretty high taxes but it’s mainly to fund the local school system which ranks high. Just about everyone with kids uses the public school system because of this and it’s a big selling point to new residents home-shopping.

But we pay for it.

I want to throw out another angle that I think is relevant:

The curriculum broadly is determined by the school board.

The school board tends to be made up of more "well off" people.

They will prioritize the types of classes that they took to get them where they are.

If you are on the school board, you are most likely not a house wife, not a mechanic, not a seamstress, etc.

So you get a prioritization on classes that lead you down the "four year degree, rise to management" type of life.

Do nutrition & medicine not get taught in science lessons? They were for me (in the UK).

Also, not sure 15 year old me could have imagined something less interesting than finance lessons where I get to figure out how to manage all the money I don’t have.

They do in South Florida when I was growing up. I also had a half year of health class, which includes nutrition. I also had home economics class, which covered nutrition, cooking, sewing, budgeting, etc. But my understanding is that those are getting cut in order to have kids focus on classes to pass tests.

> Cooking, Nutrition, Medicine, Drugs & Vitamins,

We had health class for a few years at my school.

> Finance

We had some basic finance, but I would have liked more. We covered writing a check and balancing a checkbook. I'd have liked to see more about calculating compound interest, as well as a primer on how taxes work. I can see the tax lesson failing, though, if it was too long before I got an actual job.

> Basic electronics

This was covered in college, but not high school. I'm not sure this is very practical for most people, either. People need to know how to use computers, but not necessarily how to design a circuit board.

Ah how to format word documents :-)

I did in the 1970's computer programming at my comprehensive and we started with adders, half adders and machine language programming BTW this was for the CSE stream (this not going to university)

> Kids should be made aware of the psychological help they can receive if they have personal issues. We had a psychologist at school, but I don't think anyone consulted them.

Do you think this was an issue of not being aware of the offering, as opposed to it being difficult to get help for one's personal issues because of stigma or feeling like you can handle it if you just try a little harder?

In addition to that even if you do have access to psychological help it won't be any good if the school psychologist is worse than useless (which seems to be common in this kind of field).

My experience was that the school psychologists were not competent or reasonable individuals. For example, the one in 5th grade who decided that my friend and I were each being abused because we did absurd things with her dollhouse like put figurines on the roof and in closets, just to be silly.

I agree with you. In addition I would argue that the students should have more choice over what modules they learn (why should someone who wants to be a computer scientist and hates learning languages be forced to learn german/latin and poems for example - these students should have the option to select advanced mathematics, programming, and cs theory instead if they so wish, or even random trivia) and that homeschooling should be easily available as an option if the student so wishes, same for online learning.

I would also say that something needs to be done regarding bullying and teachers that are power-tripping.

If more computer scientists studied language then we'd see better-written CS papers. It would benefit the authors too: research is more valuable when you can communicate it clearly, so people are more likely to cite a well-written paper. I think Dijkstra's fame is as much a consequence of his excellent writing as his research.

But if you had students that had specialised at 14 done GCSE's and A levels in the subject they do at uni you could have three year degrees instead of four.

How much does a year at an American University Cost ?

Essay and report-writing is already part of the curriculum for these preparing to get into a CS school. I do not think demanding from students to explain what the poet was thinking or to learn spanish will help them with writing CS papers, if anything I would argue that the reverse is true. In addition I would argue that most CS papers are well written.

Schools start this early so parents can get their kids to school and still go to work in time. You could start school at 9AM for kids old enough to do that themselves, but it's not gonna work for families with younger kids.

As for psychological help, maybe those who consulted them just didn't talk about it?

Absolutely agree on your last point though.

8:50/9am start is quite typical on the UK, from primary on. It seems to work.

When do people usually start work in the UK?

9am

Sounds like work needs to be more flexible. There's enough people without kids to cover those earlier hours.

Except the few places without public transportation, most parents don't have to take their kids to school. Starting later would probably help with overprotective parents.

Depending on where you live, it's probably not safe (and maybe even forbidden) to let young children (<10 years) go to and on public transportation alone.

You don’t always have to bring them there, but young kids do need help with getting ready for school.

Are school buses not a thing anymore? The suburb I grew up in definitely didn't have a remotely decent public transit system but the school district was required (along with all public school districts in the state of Texas IIRC) to provide a school bus that stopped within a few minutes' walk of every student's home (probably with exceptions for people who actually lived outside of the school boundaries and applied to transfer in). In high school, classes started after 9am and it all seemed to work just fine.

No, they aren't really in many places. Our district runs a couple routes with limited stops, but nothing like I remember growing up 40 years ago.

Thoughts on this format? Cafeteria open at 6am, Homeroom from 7 - 9, classes requiring your brain to be awake after that.

That seems like a really long day. I didn't have a daily homeroom, how many hours of classes are included in that? I would feel awful for any child that gets dropped off at 6am, sits in a cafeteria for an hour, sits through 2 hours of homeroom and then 8 hours of classes.

That's also probably only going to work for highschool aged kids. The reality is that they're probably capable of getting themselves to school if you have to leave early

It is not mandatory. Our school has similar system and kids spend that time playing. They dont just sit on chair. There is one teacher to supervise a group of kids, if there are too many kids the group gets split into two.

For teenagers, 10-18 or 11-19 would probably be best, including time allocated for homework.

Where I went to school (New England, USA) it was done the other way around. Elementary school started at 9am, middle school was earlier, and high schools were even earlier. That schedule didn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

Employers drive that phenomenon. They want teenagers available for work earlier in the afternoon.

We're starting an alternative school in Italy. Would love to hear your (and everyone else's) thoughts: https://shadesofgreen.school/.

> Housework (fixing things, cleaning etc), finance, time management, how to actually learn/study effectively, mental health awareness, working out with correct technique and not ruining your body, how to eat healthily

Everything on your list except housework was part of my required curriculum in High School in 1990s California (and the housework stuff was offered as an elective called Home Economics). Now I wonder if it's still there.

>- Kids should be taught practical life skills over random trivia.

School is for education and culture, that is those "random trivia".

Fixing things, cooking, and cleaning can be taught in a couple of classes (e.g. shop) or taught by their parents...

Which the UK does - not that's with out its problems i.e. having two tier gcse's aka reintroducing the old CSE exams - for those (working class) kids that where supposed to leave school at 16.

Oh and massive grade inflation

Your opinion on whether 8 a.m. is too early somewhat depends on your local time zone and clock change customs: see thousands of comments elsewhere!

However, 08:00 local astronomical time does seem too early and most European time zones are ahead of local astronomical time, sometimes ridiculously so, making 08:00 even earlier. So I don't disagree.

Had to look up astronomical time - assuming my understanding is right and you use "noon" to define the hours, I don't think it would really help in high latitude hours - no amount of temporal wiggling is going to stop kids from going to school in the dark and coming home in the dark as well.

Yes. You get about 7 hours of daylight on the shortest day at a latitude of 55°. So nearly all of the population of England could avoid going to/from school in the dark. But Scotland is another matter.

Wake up time is a zero sum game. Otherwise your points are good.

Out of curiosity: do you have kids of your own?

Homework shouldn’t be abolished. It should be orchestrated. Someone should know vaguely how much homework teachers are putting out and ensure they don’t overlap too much or all assign huge projects at once. It’s much easier than it seems.

That said, abolishing HW is great too. It’s become a crutch for bad teachers.

The state monopoly on schooling needs to be abolished. Parents must be able to give the amount of money a current state school costs to a private school of their own choice. This will enable competition and choice. As it currently stands, only wealthy people can send their children to a private school, but this is completely artificial.

>- Kids should be made aware of the psychological help they can receive if they have personal issues. We had a psychologist at school, but I don't think anyone consulted them.

I used them, they were great for scoring high quality drugs. All I needed to do was memorize a list of symptoms, regurgitate them and get referred to a specialist and do the same again.

Which is why as an adult I find the whole area of psychiatry to be bunk. And that's supposedly the harder of the psychological sciences. If you can't deal with false positives you have no place in medicine.

If I came in to a doctors office and demanded they reattach my missing leg, while clearly having two legs I'd be met (rightly) with skepticism, somehow when it comes to the mind it doesn't work that way. Surely someone would have figured out a way to measure the missing serotonin by now?

This is a very naive understanding of modern clinical psychology. Modern psychology is the way it is exactly because someone couldn't figure `out a way to measure the missing serotonin', or rather, it is a meaningless measurement.

The total failure of positivism in clinical psychology is what resulted in the current state of affairs, pushing for more of it won't bring about any imagined golden age of psychology, only further `the pandemic of mental anguish that afflicts our time' [0]. Positivism is a flawed doctrine and at this point should be considered nothing but dangerous dogma -- at least in the case of psychiatry.

[0]: I believe it was Mark Fisher that said something to this end but I digress.

If you do not have any objective measures then what you have is a cult.

By any objective standard - suicide rates, lost days of work, self harm, substance abuse, murder, etc. - we are worse off or no better today than in 1960 when we were supposedly emotionally stunted and oppressed. Every extra dollar spent on psychology/psychiatry since then has been a waste.

That's not even touching on the crisis of reproducibility that has made a mockery of the entire field and put it somewhere between catholic confessionals and recreational drug use in terms evidence based outcomes.

You seem to think I'm defending modern psychiatry, I'm not. I'm merely saying that positivism is what brought us here, and certainly isn't the way to bring us anywhere better.

You brought very little in defense of positivism, so I'm at a lose as to what I can respond with there. What I will say is that, by relying on a macroscopic outcome and declaring that any increase must be caused by the psychiatric field, you ignore the very obvious fact, something positivism constantly struggles with, that the world has changed since the 60's. Is the rise of social media the fault of psychiatry? Is underemployment? How about Fortress Europe?

By most microscopic measurements, clinical psychology is a cure that does help the majority of patients. Both in the long-term and short-term.

>By most microscopic measurements, clinical psychology is a cure that does help the majority of patients. Both in the long-term and short-term.

That is where we disagree.

Clinical psychology makes people feel better about themselves in the short term, long term there is a distinct lack of evidence of positive outcomes. And a lot of unrepeatable experiments that show positive trends which disappear when looked at more closely.

Homicide rates had local minimum at 1960 at which point they when radically up after 1964. Whatever made murders more common happened in 1964.

> School should start at a reasonable time. In my opinion, 8AM is too early. Kids that live far away have to wake up at 6AM, which is not a normal time judging by when kids wake up during summer break (9-10AM).

They wake up that late because they're staying up late. They should be waking up when the sun tells them to, and go to sleep when their body tells them to, which doesn't happen because they're surrounded by light that messes up their circadian rhythm. This has a huge impact on things like anxiety.

Consequently, there can't be one time that is optimal. Why do we work the hours that we do, year round? It doesn't make sense biologically, it's an artifact of industrialization.

https://www.washington.edu/news/2018/12/12/high-school-start...

> “Research to date has shown that the circadian rhythms of adolescents are simply fundamentally different from those of adults and children,” said lead author Gideon Dunster, a UW doctoral student in biology.

> “All of the studies of adolescent sleep patterns in the United States are showing that the time at which teens generally fall asleep is biologically determined — but the time at which they wake up is socially determined,” said Dunster. “This has severe consequences for health and well-being, because disrupted circadian rhythms can adversely affect digestion, heart rate, body temperature, immune system function, attention span and mental health.”

Seen similar information from other sources, but this came up first after a quick search. Of course screen light probably makes the problem worse, but there do seem to be significant biological factors.

There's a natural "bedtime shift" of 1-3h in adolescence, that doesn't mean it's natural for them to still be asleep when the sun is up.

The one thing that disrupts the circadian rhythm dramatically is light. This is well-established and also mentioned in the article you linked.

1-3h takes you from one side of 7AM to the other, which is generally when the sun rises around here.

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