Here's an idea - let students (and parents) sleep for an additional hour rather than make them wake up before the crack of dawn for no reason.
Turns out that that doing just this has quantifiable benefits[1].
[1] "Teens get more sleep, show improved grades and attendance with later school start time, researchers find": https://www.washington.edu/news/2018/12/12/high-school-start...
Doubly so if "affordable for the parents" means "affordable for parents who are in the same income bracket as your average pre school teacher."
Source: I've served on the board of a day care.
The other piece of the puzzle though is that there need to be sufficient providers, which can't happen instantaneously. So you'd have to scale up such an initiative in a sensible way.
I know that borders on callousness, and obviously I don't think we shouldn't take care of single parent households that don't have an option or that the child tax credit shouldn't be high enough so kids don't go hungry. Just if you reduce this to the choice to have a child and a lack of outlying circumstances, you shouldn't have a kid if you don't have someone ready to take care of them and the freedom to make that choice.
Also, there are other reasons why the situation you desribes as ideal sparked the protests back then - for many people ir was unhappy unsatisfying sitiation.
I'd like to see some change, but I'm not sure that just going back to some version of how it was done when my generation was young necessarily counts as progress.
Source? because this isn't my partner's experience. Her grand parents owned a house, cars and raised more than 5 kids on a single factory worker salary. It would be just impossible nowadays in most of the west.
Basically you have more then third of women working in any except oldest one. Third of women is a lot of women, a lot of households.
Moreover, people kind of tend to forget that women needs to eat even if husband died or got sick, even if they are single, even if husband is unemployed, even if husband is alcoholic, even if husband is in prison. People also kind of tend to forget that having to marry anyone just so that someone feeds you is one path toward disasterous abusive marriages you are trapped in (where you still have to pretend everything is ok for appareances sake).
And 1950 is when economy was the best, male employment was like 95%. And you still had women who were married and they worked and their income mattered to family. (Surprising example is Rosa Parks who worked for money and loss of income was issue to her and her husband.)
It's not done in the name of progress, it's done in the name of profitability.
The rate of profit and worker productivity are at all time highs, but who benefits? Worker compensation has been stagnant and decoupled from profitability and productivity increases for close to five decades now. Even engineer compensation hasn't kept up with productivity, inflation and cost of living increases.
As a kid, it just was.
Everyone has to get up early all year, so the track team does not have to stay up late a couple times per year. Well, also football, basketball, etc
So what if teachers have children they need to drop off before work? That leads to some kind of infinite recursion.
Your circadian rhythm is actually mediated/regulated/communicated to every cell in your body by a diurnal oscillation of YOUR BODY TEMPERATURE, which is coolest around 3am and warmest around 3pm.
These times just so happen to correspond with the times of coolest and hottest surface air temperatures on earth - and it's not a coincidence that our bodies evolved that way.
Now, in the summer, the hottest time of the day is actually LATER than it is in the winter, since the sun spends more time in the sky and the earth has more time to heat up. So it makes sense to align our circadian rhythms with that by springing forward one hour before summer, and then falling back one hour before winter - when the hottest time of day starts to edge earlier.
Where I live these things vary by a lot more than an hour, so DST has a meaningful effect on any of these supposed benefits for about, if I'm being generous, 2-3 weeks a year. It's silly.
Another thing nobody seems to realize is that we've already tried this experiment once before, and it was an utter failure. Quoting Wikipedia:
Permanent DST in the US was briefly enacted by President Nixon in 1974, in response to the 1973 oil crisis. The proposal was initially supported by an estimated 79% of the public; that support dropped to 42% after its first winter, owing to the harshness of dark winter mornings that permanent DST creates. An estimated six school children were also killed by motorists due to the new law. The new permanent DST law was retracted within the year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_time_observation_in_...
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101014144314.h...
But that's relative to the clock, and where the clock is relative to daylight hours has no relevance.
> let students (and parents) sleep for an additional hour
I have a better idea. Let’s just actually switch to permanent standard time, so we don’t have to hope that society shakes itself out.
After all, if one group of folks can figure out how to work around the change, there is no reason for everyone else to need changes.
The problem is deeply structural.
That said, there'd be nothing to prevent a school district from adjusting both school times if local parents demanded this be accommodated.
> In California there are 560 Elementary districts, 87 High School districts, 330 Unified districts.
(I do think that this isn't a great argument against switching to DST permanently. I think if this was legislated then the school districts would just adapt now, especially since a significant chunk of students are still doing remote learning.)
("why don't they just have the sports teams do one short practice in the morning, and one short practice in the afternoon?" 1. some of them actually do that already, despite the crazy-early school start time, and 2. for the less-insanely-dedicated sports that can't rely on parents to drop all the team members off before school, you'd need to run extra busses just for the sports kids, if they're showing up earlier than everyone else, and 3. Depending on the sport, one long practice is better and/or a lot more convenient than two short ones)
Another reason is that most older kids don't want to be covered in sweat for their entire high school career and having kids communally shower at school is seemingly something that is rightfully being phased out.
For a sports team, that seems silly.
Most sports have enough weird contact that the showers are probably the least of the problems.
Now, if you want to argue that sports, in general, and school should be separate, I'm all ears.
Small kids have few classes and before/after optional program that basically do childcare for parents. They are free to go much sooner. Many of them come in and out by public transport too.
Don't we, though? Parents have jobs, jobs have schedules, and those schedules need to be coordinated with school drop-off and pickup times.
I know which one I'd bet on.
I'm in the camp of "seriously, fuck high school sports" because entire districts bend their will and finances to support football programs (other sports? what other sports?) to the detriment of everyone else in the school.
But that POV is spitting into the wind. And god help you if you're in a smaller area where high school sports are the entire social center of the community.
My 8 year old nephews' school day doesn't begin until 9:40, but it ends after 5pm and allows very little sunlight for play time in the evenings. I know that when I was that age, I was far more concerned about being able to go out and play than whether the sun was up when I got up.
This brings to mind my own memories of childhood; I have a sense leftover from that that afternoon daycare is relatively common, but early morning daycare perhaps less so?
How exactly does this differ from not moving the clocks an hour ahead permanently and not delaying our schedule for the day for an hour?
If schools want to start at 8am instead of 7am in the winter, then they should just do that.
My overall point is - the equations of labor, electricity, fuel, school, daycare, geographical times and more are complex enough in this country today that it is okay to let individual schools/offices etc. pick what timings best work for them rather than artificially trying to fit everyone in the same mold.
Anyway, like everything in the US, blame the obsession with high school athletics.
When confronted with three choices and none of the three have majority support, society usually chooses the "status quo" option. Even when a proper ranked choice vote would end up with one of the other two options.
So I guess I need to keep quiet to ensure that we end up with our second choice rather than our third choice.
I'd like to propose making the day approximately 9.86 seconds longer, so that each year we accumulate 1 hour of extra time. Then, each fall, we set the clocks back one hour.
You get the benefits of DST (more sunlight later in the day in the summer) without the jarring "spring ahead" each year.
If you've got a fancy watch, just go get its movement adjusted to run 10 seconds slow. Full employment for watchmakers too, it's a shovel-ready proposal!
For clocks that take their timing from the frequency of the electric current in the power lines, that's fixable too.
I have lived where the sun doesn't appear early in the morning too and I greatly favor it. Living here the sun can set before 5 pm and during the longest days of the year I only see sunset at 730 pm. Yes, I can do more things after dark but I consider it so much worse since it makes me feel like the day is over so early and I only just finished work.
Then when you want to rest in the morning the heat and light creeps in 5 in the morning it also kills your energy for later in the day. So not sure if you are talking from experience living in a place like mine but I would prefer to return to longer evenings and quieter mornings.
In fact, in January, the sun rises here at 7:40 AM Standard Time. Which would be 8:40 AM Daylight Time.
It would be terrible to have to wake up an hour before sunrise.
I tend to disagree - better to let people sleep. There's a reason "standard" time was set up that way in the first place. I suspect it works better with our circadian rhythm that way.
I'm not advocating to move around the standard work day, but grown adults could just go to sleep an hour earlier. "let people sleep" makes no sense. It wouldn't take away an hour of their sleep.
Note that a significant portion of society doesn’t have a day job — kids, retired/elderly, caregivers & home-parents, disabled and unable to work, etc. In fact, the needs of these groups ought to be prioritized, since as you said, working adults can adapt.
Half a year there is dark long before adults go to sleep and also dark in the morning. Sun is not preventing sleep, but people dont sleep.
For all practical purposes, sun is completely irrelevant to adults sleeping.
The folks who study this:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology
Seem to have come to a consensus that if we're going to get rid of DST, then health-wise it is best to have Standard Time year-round:
> As an international organization of scientists dedicated to studying circadian and other biological rhythms, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) engaged experts in the field to write a Position Paper on the consequences of choosing to live on DST or Standard Time (ST). The authors take the position that, based on comparisons of large populations living in DST or ST or on western versus eastern edges of time zones, the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently.
* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...
For a longer-read, referencing quite a bit of academic literature, but a conclusionary snippet:
> In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently. The latter would exaggerate all the effects described above /beyond/ the simple extension of DST from approximately 8 months/year to 12 months/year (depending on country) since /body clocks/ are generally even later during winter than during the long photoperiods of summer (with DST) (Kantermann et al., 2007; Hadlow et al., 2014, 2018; Hashizaki et al., 2018). Perennial DST increases SJL prevalence even more, as described above.
* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...
Other position papers that I've dug up over the years when curiosity got the better of me:
> Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) is dedicated to advancing rigorous, peer-reviewed science and evidence-based policies related to sleep and circadian biology.
* https://srbr.org/advocacy/daylight-saving-time-presskit/
* (refs, with pro and con): https://srbr.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/DST-References-S...
European Sleep Research Society:
* https://esrs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/To_the_EU_Commiss...
American Academy of Sleep Medicine (with 36 footnotes if you want to dig further):
* https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.8780
* https://doi.org/10.5664/jcsm.8780
The Centre for Chronobiology, based at the Psychiatric University Hospital (University of Basel):
* http://www.chronobiology.ch/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/JBR-D...
In fact, in January, the sun rises here at 7:40 AM Standard Time. Which would be 8:40 AM Daylight Time.
It would be terrible to have to wake up an hour before sunrise.
Now, these days, I have a lot of schedule flexibility and at least for activities I'm doing on my own I could just get up earlier in the summer. I'll be a bit out of sync with business schedules but I could largely do it.
This change just allows states to make DST permanent.
Way back when I was in school there were a couple that had 10 hour days, to better accomodate parent's schedules. Drop junior off when it fits your morning schedule best, same for pickup in the afternoon. Teachers worked on the early end, late end, took a long lunch, worked four 10 hour days, whatever suited the needs of their students and their own lives. The pickup and dropoff zones didn't get gridlocked with every single parent showing up at the same exact time. My point is, there are far better options available than fooling around with time itself.
I don't think people are considering this reality in this debate.
I am not advocating for anything.
Again assuming there is some net benefit to the economy to offset this cost.
Do you mean other schools in your school district or schools in other districts?
it was just a crowded and large area. a single high school even put 9th graders in a totally different building and location. It was basically middle middle school. All the levels of school had different start and end times to accommodate, and there were many schools at each level with overlapping bussing.
We probably got here (counterproductive start times) by making budgets the first consideration - with literally everything else following it. It also explains why we segment kids by age.
Probably easier to just give them all flashlights, than to have everyone shift their clocks to accommodate this use case.
These days all clocks change automatically, and there are standard and constantly improving datetime libraries to help applications manage these human factors in a standard way. Your morning alarm is automatically updated, you calendar events automatically reflect the timezone they are defined in.
The only curveball is when when the government arbitrarily changes the rules, like then did not too long ago in extending DST. And which DST advocates are advocating for doing _again_.
But honestly I believe this reporting is overblown. The body is able to adjust rather quickly to such a small difference in time, as many of us who (used to) travel quite frequently know.
IMHO what would help is colleges putting a stop to the resume-padding they implicitly encourage students to do to gain an edge on their peers for acceptance.
That’s basically how it works now anyway.
That outcome might be aligned with your goals; it's probably not aligned with Harvard's goals nor that of their alumni.
There’s data to suggest that applying to Harvard is a stronger predictor of lifetime outcomes than the incremental prediction provided by graduating is. So, much of the benefit is provided before campus, but that doesn’t mean that 5x as many people would get the benefit if only they’d be convinced to fill out that application by virtue of admissions being driven by rolling dice.
https://time.com/54342/it-doesnt-matter-where-you-go-to-coll...
When exactly is the "crack of dawn"? Unless you live near the equator the "crack of dawn" changes every day. If "additional hour" is relative to the clock then you can always start things an hour late relative to the clock, regardless of where the clock is relative to daylight hours.
To complete the sensible set, elementary schools open first, high schools last.
In brutal southern climates, end the school year on Halloween when kids can play outside w/o heat stroke - with kids inside air conditioning during worthless summer months.
So school must start early enough parents can get children to school before heading to their jobs.
I can't even understand what is 'hard' about it?
Seems a no brainer.
I commuted to college long ago one winter with DST. I did not enjoy it. I'm not sure I'd have enjoyed it even living on campus.
Lol why? What do they think happens at half-light?
Or just close the schools permanently, sell the assets, commit to at-home learning or micro-schools.