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