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Let Teenagers Sleep

scientificamerican.com

589 pointsBender474 comments

The real blame for early high school is extra-curricular sports. Basketball, Football, etc.

For those sports to thrive, teams need to practice, in order for practice to be efficient, it needs to be at least an hour. So 2 hours are allocated (suit up, practice, suit down). In order for children to be able to commit to 2 hours extra of their time BEFORE their parents get home (5pm), class would have to end by 3pm. Now, pair that with the fact that most school districts don't have enough bus drivers for every school, they pair up. A single bus driver will start their day bussing high school, then will bus elementary school (which starts later in the day). So high school ends a little earlier so the bus drivers can bus the elementary school kids home after they bus the high school kids. In order for the kids in high school to end at 2:15pm for sports and to save money on bus driver employment and bus fleet, they have to start 2:15pm - 8hr: 6:15am. It's crazy. It was like that when I went to high school in the early 90s, it's still the same today.

Huh? Sports can practice before school. And high school athletes don't need parental supervision.

School hours are set by transportation needs, as you already observed.

> Sports can practice before school

Hilarious, given the original thread.

School already starts far too early.

No such thing as too early. Our public HS swim team used to do the water part at 6am then cross training (running or weight room) after school. Probably because of pool availability

Swimming seems to have a tradition of pre-dawn practice times. I never understood that. Nobody uses the high school pool after school (unless there's a meet).

No schools around here have pools, have to share the YMCA pools with other groups

You’re kidding right? To me, requiring students to wake up before 7 AM should be considered hazing.

No one's requiring kids to compete on a high school swim team.

Replacing a generic "required" with "required to join a group/team" actually makes it sound more like hazing to me.

They're saying that, rather than having school from 8am to 3pm and sports to 3pm to 5pm, you could have sports from 8am to 10am and school from 10am to 5pm, for example.

In other words, have the students who do optional activities come in early rather than stay late. Then only some students come in early instead of all of them.

If there is evidence that it is too early for kids that age, then its too early, and school-sponsored extra-curriculars shouldn’t be at that time.

Have some of the non-teaching staff time that is usually blocked into full non-teaching days split into that time, and add more but shorter teaching days,

School hours are set by tradition. My city provides no bus service to any students (excepting special needs kids). Crazy I know. Kids can ride the city metro buses for free, but those aren't the same as school buses.

What's the rationale for some schools having a bus service and others not? In Australia, I'm not aware of any metropolitan state school having a bus service, so it sounds bizarre that buses would dictate starting times.

Some private schools might have small buses. Otherwise, public and private students would use public transport, ride, walk or get dropped off by parents.

In Netherland it's also only the special needs schools that pick up students in buses (because they're very specialised and kids can come from a very large area and might not be sufficiently able to travel on their own). But most kids just use their bike.

But I gather bikes are not a thing in many other countries.

In the Friday nights lights states, we lift every other morning at 6am, practice ends at 6pm

Uh, this is pretty much the case with other extra-curriculars, too. My school had a very strong and diverse performing arts program and kids often stayed late enough for parents to pick them up after work.

This is exactly why. We've been at our administrators for years and the response always is "the bus routes" but in reality it's because of the sports schedules.

High school sports is a drain on the educational system, plain and simple. It lacks equity - an disproportionate amount of money is spent on very few children. The football coach in our HS has a Vice Principal title, so he doesn't have to teach classes but knocks down $100K+ to run the team. There are maybe 120 kids in the football program, in a high school of 2000.

If you look at Europe, sports clubs are run by outside groups and happen after school on their own resources. I'd love to see that here. I mean, we do have year-round club teams and that's another problem. Too many parents overload their kids with sports either because they're living through their kids, or they think it's a shot at a college scholarship. It burns the kids out and rarely turns into anything profitable.

It's weird to discuss children as turning them into something profitable

When college costs six figures, you hope to break even. And that's a whole different ball of wax in America.

Most state universities cost nothing near this, especially if you discount room and board.

You need to live somewhere and eat, so it’s not sensible to include those costs with the cost of college.

While students need somewhere to sleep and eat, the cost of doing so on campus are much higher than anywhere else (in my limited experience). For example, the cost of on-campus room and board my junior year was 4x the cost of my off-campus room and board the following year. Some schools don't allow for off-campus housing for some or all students, or still require commuters to purchase a meal plan. So perhaps while it's not sensible to include all room and board costs with the cost of college, it's definitely fair to include some or even most.

Non big city schools aren’t a 4x multiple or even 2x. And most schools aren’t in New England.

And most schools don’t require dorming, especially for all 3/4 years. The average student loan debt for a graduating undergrad is 23k. If college costs were truly 100k that just wouldn’t be the case.

Edit: median

Obviously I didn't go to most schools. But none I attended were in a big city, and none were in New England, so it's not just a "big city" or "New England" problem. Regardless, I have never personally seen an example of on-campus room and board being <= off-campus room and board.

> The [median] student loan debt for a graduating undergrad is 23k. If college costs were truly 100k that just wouldn’t be the case.

I fail to see how that necessarily follows because:

- many students and families save for college, so there's a cash downpayment

- many students work to cover part of college costs

- many families work to cover part of college costs

But this seems an unproductive rabbit trail from the issue of letting kids get their sleep.

That's the entire purpose of the school system. To make them into workers that can produce value for companies.

Having an educated electorate is a goal as well, at least in some places in the world.

Can't have them read Marx in high school. Everything would collapse.

Doubtful.

They read Orwell and Huxley and based on the state of the world those lessons don't appear to stick.

True, most folks don't even realize Orwell was a Democratic Socialist.

Private sports outside of school are too expensive for all but the well-off families. School sports are basically free for the participants, and they are good for kids' social development and physical health. Sports keeps many kids in high school, certainly if my oldest hadn't had cross-country and track he probably would have dropped out.

That's another difference between Europe and the US. When I grew up in Germany there was a huge amount of sports available that were taught by volunteers. Soccer, judo, karate all for free even in the rural area I grew up in. I wonder if it's possible because everyone isn't constantly threatened by looming bankruptcy if they don't save big piles of cash.

The parent comment was a little misleading. In the US there is a ton of sports available for every student to join. Really the only people who don't play sports are those who don't want to.

Correct. I used to coach youth sports. There were waivers and “scholarships” available. Equipment was provided by the club (this was football and basketball). Coaches and other parents did the transport.

Thank you to share about your childhood experience.

This part:

    I wonder if it's possible because everyone isn't constantly threatened by looming bankruptcy if they don't save big piles of cash.

I'm confused. What does it mean?

I assume they are referring to lack of a safety net, though I don't know what in particular that has to do with volunteering to coach youth sports.

Less time to coach when you gotta grind

Also if you get injured playing sports, you could bankrupt your family. Maybe they have enough savings to cover the deductible for the year. Too bad Football is a winter sport and you could just as easily have hospital bills that cross over into the new year.

In Europe these clubs are often community or publicly funded. If they charge partition fees, you’ll often find municipalities subsidizing them heavily making them effectively free for kids and parents. Now there is still some problems with this system (in particular overemphasis on sports over other cultural activities such as theater, music, etc.)

Sorry if it's an ignorant question since my kid hasn't reached sports age yet. But athleticism doesn't seem like it should be an optional choice that detracts from other educational resources. Why not make it mandatory, 1h a day for everyone? Saves on travel, saves on transition time, saves on economy of scale and it's more equitable since everyone pays through taxes and everyone benefits in the short term (more parents in the workforce, less cost on nannies, take-out food etc) and in the long term (lower health care cost into adult age). People with differences in physical abilities are surly better cared for with pooled resources than planning for exercise individually.

If only. I think the social dynamic around mandatory sports in school basically ensures that some 70% of kids are turned off from any kind of sports at an early age. If you want athleticism (or really just healthy habits desperately needed in our chair-fixated lifestyles) you probably need to practice it with them yourself.

Generally everyone has to take gym class. Sports are additional. Teams are competitive to get into and different kids will specialize in different ones depending on their strengths and interests. Some schools do require every student to choose at least one sport. There are other extracurriculars such as drama, speech & debate, and special choirs or chamber orchestras that may or may not be compatible with different sports.

What did you do in gym class?

In England, we had a short "physical education" class once a week. That varied between gymnastics, swimming, badminton, indoor cricket, athletics, and occasionally other indoor-ish things.

We also had an afternoon ice a week of "games", which was football, rugby, hockey, cricket, softball or similar. Longer, always outdoor sports.

(This will probably vary within England, I don't think I've ever asked other people what they did.)

It depended on the season: touch football and soccer in the fall, basketball and wresting in the winter, softball and running in the spring. There would be also calisthenics--push-up, sit-ups, jumping jacks, occasionally burpees. And their would be drills such as "touchlines"--running on the basketball court.

It has been fifty years, but I think that PE was twice a week. Class was about an hour.

At least when I was in high school in the early 10's, gym class was about 3 hours per week. We mostly stayed in the gym. This was Texas however. It could be up to 100 degrees until October. Running was not required. Sweating wasn't really required for an A+ as evidenced by some girls in the class. It was a checkbox for the state mandated requirements.

gym class = physical education. In the US it's similar as in various sports and running but one funny thing is almost everyone has to learn square dancing.

one funny thing is almost everyone has to learn square dancing

That's very regional. I don't recall square dancing was ever an option where I grew up.

I think most schools have physical education, which is pretty much just mandatory exercises. After-school sports are more about culture and competition then exercise. Not everyone is competitive, and it could be really damaging for some kids to be forced into a competitive environment they don’t enjoy. It is much better to allow kids to choose whether they would rather participate in other non-competitive cultural activities after school (such as the theater, hacking, anime drawing, gardening, or whatever)

That’s PE (physical education). Worse class ever, but required.

PE is a good example because different people have different physiology and will respond better or worse to different exercise schedules.

As an adult, people are so varied. The concept of forcing kids, who absolutely are as or more varied than their adults, into so much structure is cruel. I get that some people are lazy and without something telling them what to do they will happily fail. But school today is more about grinding then down than building them up. And they bully and harass each other as consequence.

Leaving my soapbox there…

After reading all of these I still think it's "the bus routes", or more generally speaking, "the commuting".

I grew up in an asian country and my parents never picked me up after I was 10. I just took buses from home to school and then from school to home. I'm not saying our system is better than the US, but it's a bit of culture shock that everyone commutes in their (parents') cars there.

Canada, I started finding my own way to and from school around 10 too

I'd wager the public transit is safer in your country.

Safer than, say, Baltimore, which uses the same system?

Ah yes, Baltimore, the epitome of public transportation infrastructure

Way to shoot down an argument nobody was making. OP referred to safe, which Baltimore isn't, and yet kids take the public buses as the primary transit to and from school all over the city for the past several decades.

You know, now that I think about it. I bet the school buses aren't very safe in Baltimore either.

Baltimore does not have public school buses. That's what I've been saying. Students take the city bus system.

GP doesn't have any idea what he's talking about; he's clearly just fallen for the right-wing propaganda that puts Baltimore at the center of American ills, a la Chicago. Baltimore's public transit is quite decent, between busses and light rail, and (particularly downtown) its identity as a colonial city makes it hell for driving - which, consequently, makes it that much more pleasant to walk/bike. It could become even better, now that we no longer have a certain gubernatorial impediment. The only thing he has close to correct is the safety issue, but it's not like the entire city is a warzone. Rather, it varies block-by-block, and even then, I caution againt exaggeration. Certain people feel accosted by the ever-present window washers, while I can't remember ever feeling unsafe the dozens of times I was set loose as a kid for school trips or visited for Otakon.

Having children use it — which covers the whole range of society in every demographic except age — might help keep it safer. It in parents' interest to keep it safe and useful.

I commute to work most days on the bus in Washington, DC, and depending on the hour of the morning will see unaccompanied school children, admittedly more from middle-school age up.

AFAIK this has a lot to do with cul-de-sac / suburbia development, combined with the US's chronic non-investment in public transit, combined with the comparative perceived-and-real safety levels.

AKA -

You literally can't take buses from school to home in most cases, and when you can, they're probably way to sketchy for kids to do.

At the same time, the kids in my neighborhood are bused to school. The school is a mile away with zero road crossings (one short pedestrian tunnel). The rest is walking paths. Parents and kids sit in the idling cars at the edge of the neighborhood waiting for the bus. They could just about walk to school in that waiting time.

I think there are 2 different things being discussed here:

1. Commuting via school bus vs. parents' cars

2. Commuting via public bus

In the US, at least for the first 25 years of my life, most people I knew got to school by school bus unless they lived within walking distance or were old enough to drive themselves. Some kids parents would drive them, but it usually was either due to it being too cold to walk (or wait for the bus), a special occasion where they needed to bring in some large or fragile object for a project, or them being in an unincorporated part of the town that the school busses didn't serve. (I think this was fairly rare.) Since I don't have kids of my own, I don't know how it's changed in the last 25 years, but I still see school busses all over my current city (Los Angeles), so they're still a thing.

Where I grew up in a rural part of the MidWest, there were no public buses. Our town was too small for them to run efficiently.

I lived in a not-too-rural city in the Midwest of about 40,000 at the time, and we still didn’t have school busing for anyone in the city. It was only for rural folks.

I was forced to get my drivers’ license at 16 to drive 10 min to school because the alternative was walking 1.2 hours every morning one way ti get to school… meaning leaving the house at around 6:00am.

The city had no city bus, so there was zero public transit option.

That was weird.

Bike not an option?

Quite possibly not. It is reasonably safe only if infrastructure allows it. Biking on a major road where a bunch of teenagers drives the car is neither healthy nor safe.

Most parts of the U.S. are not well designed for bikes or pedestrians, only cars. Also, many schools in the U.S. have really large districts, so some students live really far from the school.

In many places this would mean children would be required to bike on 55mph+ 5-lane roads with no shoulder and no bike lane for 5-20+ miles.

Nearly all public schools in the U.S. provide a free bus system for all students for this reason.

This was me in elementary school. I went to a private school briefly where there wasn’t a bus and my mother had to work so I had to bike 20 miles to school through rush hour traffic at 11 years old.

Yikes! Thank goodness you got through it, and hopefully they've started offering buses or there are bike lanes in your city.

That was the weird part about our city: they simply did not offer it.

Literally every family was expected to have a car, and get their child to school in a car... or somehow have them walk, but apparently not too far, since temperatures would routinely dip to single digits Fahrenheit throughout the winter months.

A little story to give you an idea:

I rode a bike on our quiet neighborhood streets when I was about 12. I was returning a rented video game back to the store. I generally stayed to the side of the main lane, where cars are typically parked on the street. However, in one area, cars were parked, so I had to go around them.

In spite of me going slowly, and not making any kind of darting move - I gradually moved over and looked over my shoulder for many seconds before I came towards the parked cars - someone behind me yelled a curse word at me as they passed me and flipped me off.

I had the sheer audacity of riding a bike on a street.

# # #

Sidewalks are not really intended for riding bikes, but that was the only place I felt somewhat safe riding them, other than the dedicated walking and bike paths that stretched around the outside of our city and did not get to within half a mile of my high school.

And riding a bike as a 16 year old from December 1 - March 15 through likely multiple inches of snow on the ground, and certainly on icy conditions? No way. The big puffy tires that are somewhat popular today in winter were something I hadn't even heard of in the 1990s.

Edit: and as other commenters mentioned, no bike lanes. Bike lanes on a road in that city were not present until 2012, many years after I was in high school, and even now are being questioned by the mayor of the city: https://www.kfyrtv.com/2022/05/30/safe-biking-routes-bismarc...

So... no, it was not an option. If I had suggested it, my parents, friends, classmates, and teachers would likely all have tried to talk me out of it.

I grew up in a part of the US and I think by second grade my older brother probably 10 was walking us all back to our grandparents house which was like 10 minutes from the school.

Never commuted on a car or took buses since there were none. Just my town had the houses near the schools. I know now is worse because a lot of the schools have been consolidated into megaschools so I'm assuming this generation drives a ton more.

Does what you are saying about sports also apply to theater and music?

Is a disproportionate amount of money spent on very few children for theater and music?

Yes?

Not where I grew up. Sports teams, theater and music programs were all funded equally. All extracurriculars came with fees and fundraisers. One of the gym teachers, also the basketball coach, was useless if the team was likely to make a playoff run. One of the English teachers, the theater director, was equally useless during the weeks leading up to a performance.

I thought the GGP was being unfair to athletics. Scholastic athletics are a necessary outlet for a lot of kids, as are theater and music. If you are going to do away with one of them, do away with all of it.

Maybe in certain areas of the USA (Texas, the deep south) you get an excess of public money going to athletics, in which case GGP has a valid point. But that wasn't my experience.

And in a country where 69% of adults are overweight, and 36% are obese [1], I would like to see even more emphasis on physical education (including after-school sports) rather than less.

[1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesi...

I've come to see obesity and our production of elite athletes as two sides of the same coin.

When I was in high school my baseball and football practices were 2-3 hours long and I would be exhausted and wheezing by the end of them. I have a knee injury from freshman year that still bothers me 20 years later. That's an insane time and energy commitment, I see why a lot of kids end up doing nothing.

I'd like to see more options that are lower intensity, don't require a commitment, and meet kids where they're at fitness level-wise.

I agree that the emphasis should be more on increasing participation rather than producing elite athletes - at least in public schools. I went out for football my freshman year and the practices were just way too intense/violent for me, and I eventually ended up getting injured and quitting. That experience pretty much turned me off from school sports for good.

If my school offered boys' badminton or volleyball (there were girls' teams but not boys), I could totally see myself as enjoying those sports.

Football and baseball are tricky cases because it takes a lot to get 11 players to work in anything like unison and if someone like the left offensive tackle (for a right-handed quarterback) forgets their job or is incompetent it's quite dangerous.

In baseball, the very basic skill of hitting is just hard to accomplish. It takes a lot of practice hours to get the bare minimum of competency.

But I think these are two very important cultural games and I would be sad if they weren't played in public schools, it would be a real loss.

So once again we face a problem and I really don't know what the solution is.

I think the US has a food problem more than an activity/exercise problem. Over the long term one cannot outrun a poor diet.

Attempts to fix this problem are met with derision and quickly toppled due to politics over reason, see: https://letsmove.obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/healthy-school...

Fair point about diet contributing more to obesity than exercise. And I am 100% on board with making school lunches healtier, and teaching kids about the importance of nutrition.

But exercise is also important for managing weight [1], and preventing/managing chronic disease [2]. And only about a quarter of adults in the US meet the HHS' activity guidelines [3].

[1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesi...

[2] https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/fitness/in-dept...

[3] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db443.htm

What about building schools closer to population centers and provide pedestrian and bike infrastructure to it from nearby residential areas, such that kids could safely walk or bike to and from school?

Its sleep everyone needs. Lack of sleep which is culturally forced onto a group of people with things like school hours, college hours, office hours, shift work, is the fastest most consistently subtle way to ruin people's health and keep them in check.

You'd be surprised at how many people lose weight just by sleeping better.

When was the last time you jumped out of bed with a spring in your step?

There is also such a thing as diet induced obesity.

In North America, due to its vastness, everyone has drive somewhere, how on earth can people get their exercise if they are driving everywhere? Europe, is compact enough so that people can walk and get stuff, but the food legislation will play its part in creating obesity.

Probably. Jocks, drama kids, band kids, debate kids, various history/math/science team competitions, etc.

Theater and music is after school.

I used to be in two team sports on the same season, theater, chess and computer club in high school and mid school.

Day looked like this wake up at 5:30. Be gross and just brush my teeth and walk to school. Do sport 1 from 6:00 to 7:30 shower and eat food from bag. While entering class at 7:50.

School day ended 2:15 alternating clubs different days (theatre, chess , computer)

3:30 sport 2 till 5:00pm

Walk back home.

I didn't play sports the other season so mostly just play Magic with other folks when sports was supposed to be there.

We also had theatre or music has an elective class. But club did better parts.

> The football coach in our HS has a Vice Principal title, so he doesn't have to teach classes but knocks down $100K+ to run the team

Presumably being Vice Principal carries other responsibilities beyond just coaching football. For perspective, the Vice Principal at my high school didn’t teach classes OR coach any sports - being Vice Principal is a full-time position on its own. And this was in a school with far fewer than 2000 students.

I'll bet your vice principal could teach classes, and used to teach classes before being promoted. They may even do so occasionally, if a teacher is unexpectedly sick. My school's vice principal taught two class, so about 4 hours a week IIRC.

I'll also bet that's unlikely to be the case for the football coach.

Best history teacher I ever had was a guy who's "real career" was coaching.

> sports clubs are run by outside groups and happen after school on their own resources

I'm sorry, I don't get your argument here... in your first sentence you say school sports harms equity, but then you advocate for private sports clubs - which in my poor district would mean a whole lot of kids not able to participate without the publicly-provided funding of those public school activities. School sports, music, theater, etc is the equity that wouldn't be otherwise available if we all moved to privatized education, clubs, etc. Which is not to say if those clubs are available in your community and you can afford them, good for you and your kids.

> In order for children to be able to commit to 2 hours extra of their time BEFORE their parents get home (5pm), class would have to end by 3pm

Why would they need to be able to complete their sports before their parents get home?

It was probably more accurate to say before their parents get off.

I still don't really understand why this is important. Presumably kids aren't playing sports every day of the week, so they'll have plenty of time to spend with their parents on the other days. I used to play Tennis from something like 5pm to 7pm a couple of days a week when I was a kid and that didn't seem to cause any problems.

Practice is every day of the week in the US

For high school football players it's basically practice Monday-Thursday then game on Friday. For basketball players it's basically any day during the week that they don't have a game. I was in marching band and we practiced after school every day.

Sorry, but that's insane. That's fine for high-level near-professional sports, but for some basic school sports, training every day is ridiculous and sacrificing the health and education of the students for it is just plain stupid.

Why does this happen? Why does everything have to move for this? And if they really absolutely want to do this during daylight hours, why not have the sports before school, and have just the fanatical athletes show up really early while the other students can get a normal night's sleep?

I'm gonna be real with you: it was fun. I was never the best athlete or trombone player when I did marching band but myself and many other kids who honestly didn't have a future playing sports at a collegiate level had genuine fun playing and practicing.

And after school is literally the most convenient time to practice for everyone involved including coaches, parents, and students due to the peculiarities of American living. When I was in school around half of American school children played some kind of organized sport and most probably got the same night's sleep as the other half that didn't. At the collegiate level they do what you suggest and often have two practices a day in the morning and evening for the biggest sports.

I'm all for everybody doing sports, and I can see massive advantages in integrating it with school life. My teenager refuses to do any sports or other extracurricular activities other than gaming and D&D, so he only gets the regular couple of hours of PE at school. I'd love it if I could get him to do more than that.

But training every day sounds a bit much. As far as I know, even youth football clubs around here only train 2 or 3 evenings a week. Maybe more if you've got a shot at going professional? I've heard of fanatical swimmers swimming every morning before school, but those are exceptions. I did martial arts, and that was just once a week.

Speaking from Europe: after school is literally the most convenient time to practice for everyone involved too. And while sports are in non school clubs, some of them are indeed quite involved. Some are 3 times a week, others 1 time a week, but competitive ones are 4-5 times a week or more. By more I mean including weekend and sometimes morning practice. I know kids that have these amounts of sport now with dancing, soccer etc. I did swimming and we had 3 times a week morning practice back then.

I kinda feel like this is one of those situations where Americans think their system is exceptionally inferior ... in ways that are not actually that much dissimilar to what other countries do.

Well that's just it I don't believe it's inferior. And most Americans will gey their kids into some kind of sport if they can afford it. As the saying goes: a good kid is a tired kid.

    Sorry, but that's insane. That's fine for high-level 
    near-professional sports

To be clear: high school sports seasons typically last for only 3 or 4 months. So that schedule doesn't seem excessive to me.

We're not talking about 52 weeks x 5 days x 4 years.

Not sure if you were already aware. Or if this impacts your thinking.

Now, some parents book their kids' lives so full of sports (multiple sports, multiple leagues, etc) that it DOES become insane in my view. I'm sure that we at least agree on that.

So everything is crammed into 3 or 4 intensive months, and nothing the rest of the year? That seems less insane but more imbalanced. Over here I think it's all year round, except for a stop in winter for outdoor sports (sometimes filled in by an indoor variant), and during summer vacation.

Your comments are contradictory.

You claim the US is "insane" for having kids play sports year round, and then when informed of reality, you claim that having kids play sports for only part of the year seems "imbalanced" unlike the superior system in your country where they play, uh, "all year round."

There's definitely a communication breakdown here.

To be clear: American sports are extremely a la carte. Kids can play as many or as little as they like. Different sports happen during different seasons. For example in our area schools boy's tennis is in the spring and girls' tennis is in the fall. This is because the courts are outdoor, there aren't enough courts for both to play at once, and too cold in the winter. Summer is generally too hot and kids are on vacation. Winter sports are indoor sports like volleyball, swimming, basketball, etc. If kids are really serious about a sport they can play nearly year round if they like because there are leagues that operate apart from schools.

No, I used "insane" for training every day of the week, instead of just once or twice per week. "Imbalanced" is doing highly intensive every day training for a few months and then nothing the rest of the year.

I'm not calling the system in my country "superior", I'm just pointing out that it's generally once or twice a week all year round. And I think that's a more balanced approach.

But of course the systems are completely different because in the US it's attached to schools, whereas here it's all independent.

Ah, I see. I figured there was a communication break somewhere.

    every day of the week

I don't know of any school sport that is "every day of the week." Even football is usually 4 days of practice + 1 game per week, 3-4 months a year.

If that is your idea of "insane," fine, we can differ.

    highly intensive

The vast majority of school sports are pretty casual, quite honestly. For example I used to help the local high school tennis coach. I'm not sure those kids broke a sweat on most days.

Football tends to be the most intense. But even then not every day is intense. Usually in the beginning of the week you might focus on strength and cardio. Thursday is more of a strategy day. Kind of a rest day physically because tomorrow, you play. Then Friday is your game.

There are surely exceptions to the rule. When I was in high school there was a nearby team that trained basically year round from what I heard. When their long time coach retired he did it on the last day of the season. He said he chose that timing because their off-season weight training routine started the next day so he was handing things off to the new coach then and there. That sounds pretty excessive to me, but also, if you went to that school and chose to be a part of that sport you knew what you were getting into. So if that's what somebody else wants I'm not going to say they were wrong as long as they enjoy it.

For context please note that even in that "fanatical" school we are talking about perhaps 40-50 kids from a class of maybe 500. This is not the norm for children even in that school. I would point to our childhood obesity epidemic as evidence that, in general, we are not exactly inundating our children with intensive exercise regimens.

Because in the US there is very little public transport infrastructure and most neighborhoods are not walkable. Buses have already left the school by 5pm. The only way for the kid to get home is their parent to pick them up.

> It was probably more accurate to say before their parents get off.

But, again, why? They don’t need to be done before their parents are done with work,

The reason that sports dictate school start times isn't difficulty in scheduling practices (since you could, at least on paper, put those practices before school starts rather than after). The problem is that sports are competitive between school districts, so you need shared non-school but school-adjacent time blocks between neighboring districts to schedule games in. Shifting one district much later (to run 9-5, for example) would make it impossible for that school to compete with others after school, which is going to be a practical nonstarter.

In my mind, this is one of the biggest obstacles to changing school timing significantly. Most other objections are internal to a school district, so a single motivated school board could tackle and fix them, but this problem requires coordination between many different school districts all at once.

Same principle but it was different in my schools system. High school starts 30 minutes after elementary and middle school.

6:15? Holy crap. High school here (Australia) starts at 8:50. And even then I think that's too early for natural teenage sleep patterns.

My kids are lucky in that we're close enough to school that they can leave at around 8:15. When I was in high school I had to get the bus at 7:30, which was a real struggle. The idea of starting school at 6:15 is just pure insanity.

My public school in the US always started at 8:00.

I've never heard of a 6:15 start time.

Also, school was never a full 8 hours. So I'm confused about their reasoning.

I am going on 2 decades removed from my American high school, so maybe things have changed. But I also recall starting school within +/- 10 minutes of 8:00 AM.

The only exception was strictly extracurricular, a men's choir which practiced between 7:00 and 8:00 AM. The expectation, implicitly, was that parents or friends were going to be the ones getting you there.

My high schools first period started around 7:20. Not as bad a 6, but still too early IMO.

I took an optional extra class at 630. It wasn’t bad; I just went to sleep earlier to compensate.

As a middle / HS student in the rural US I got on my bus at 5:55 to start school at 7:30. When I wasn't in sports I would leave school at 2:30 on the bus and get home at 4:30 (we stopped at the elementary school to pick them up and take them home in the afternoons).

When I had sports I would usually get home from practice at around 6-630 at night. Ideal time management would mean I'd eat and do an hour or two of homework, but usually I'd stay up until ~2AM using dialup internet to MUD with friends. I was exhausted! Playing MUD did help lead me to my career though, so I suppose it wasn't all bad.

In my high school we had a few "competitive" sports teams, which really meant just absolute suffering. Kids would be waking up for 2 hours of swim practice before class, where they would be puking on the edge of the pool, followed by more practice after class, then they had to you know do the whole homework part time job and get into college thing in whatever time is left. Wrestling was just as bad but the kids would starve themselves or wear trashbags under hoodies during the day to make weight on tournaments, along with chewing tobacco to spit more water. At least our football team and basketball teams sucked enough for the players to never take practice or games seriously.

>The real blame for early high school is extra-curricular sports. Basketball, Football, etc.

No its not, the article clearly states teenagers need 9 hours of sleep. If you choose to get up at 5am you just need to be in bed by 8pm. If you don't want to go to bed at 8, don't do sport and get up at 5.

The parents and students themselves when they try and do too much.

What do you mean choose? They don't get to choose when school starts.

Even setting aside how hard it is for a teenager to sleep that early.

I'd buy this if schools with virtually no sports teams had 9am or later start times. In Seattle there are private schools that could start whenver they want with virtually extra curriculars who also start at 8am.

Additionally most sports teams don't have practice ending at 5pm. My sons basketball team didn't end until 6:30, because they have study hall for the athletes right after school.

Your assertion just doesn't ring true.

European high schools commonly start at 8. So, the idea that it is something specific to USA in opposition to other countries does not sound right.

I'm not convinced this is the real root cause, this is just a reasonable sounding theory that's easy to nod along to. Other countries don't follow this time pattern and have extra curricular activities and nonsense school hours all the same. As a single data point, where I'm from you usually have a gap after school so you can do your homework and then you do extra activities in the evening. Transportation is handled by public transport so everyone can come and go as they need and please.

I agree, I think the culture around kids activity is not optimal in the US, and I think the primary culprit is weird urban planning. Schools are often located far away from population centers, and there is no walking and biking infrastructure for kids to get them selves there safely, so they have a massive amount of school buses to make up for that, and the whole schedule and culture is organized around limitation with school buses and drivers.

In Europe it is normal that school and kids culture is detached. There are cultural activities (including sports) which kids get them self to after school. In USA all these activities are organized by the school it self and if it is outside of the school area, a school bus is organized to take kids there. This could be so much easier if they would just build the schools close enough to population centers with enough biking and walking infrastructure that kids could get there by them selves.

Do high schools in Europe start significantly later then in US? Germany, Czech and Poland starts at 8:00.

In Iceland they start between 8:00 and 9:00 (and being on permanent DST this is actually worse in Iceland). So like my parent said, sports (and other kids culture) are not the reason for sleep depriving teenagers, they are merely an additional contributor.

I just felt the need to state the difference in culture here, where US kids activities are really tightly coupled with school activities. While in Europe a simple change in policy—often just on a school administration level—is needed, while in the USA, this is way more complicated.

Yep, I was in school district that was 9am-4pm for high schoolers and I was still able to swim for 2 hours every morning beforehand just fine.

Of course other times are doable, it's just a matter of how much blowback the school board is willing to take from parents.

That's really strange. Where I live the high schools do not provide bus service at all. There are city bus stops in front of the high schools and high school students get a big discount when they buy a student transit pass.

Yet we still have the high school students starting at ungodly early hours in the morning!

That's good but early start times are not exclusive to the US or places where sports and bussing introduce the same kinds of constraints. There are more convincing explanations for this, such as: it doesn't work when kids have to be to school at the same time parents need to be at work - staggering the morning routine and drop-off times and all. Plus, who is starting school at 6:15? Are you talking about an opt-in zero hour? That is by choice. If starting that early is bad for your academics or health, the choice is clear, drop the sport.

Why does high school have to go first in the morning? When I was in elementary school I would wake up at 5:30-6am naturally and watch TV before school. Come high school and I was constantly not getting enough sleep with the earlier start times and setting my own bed times. I think high school aged children have more need for a later start than elementary school aged children.

I agree with your specific point but my experience with obscene lack of sleep during my high school years was owed to extracirculars in general.

On top of athletics, I was also part of Men's Glee (and symphony choir, and swing choir for a year) in high school. Men's Glee formed while I was in the 10th grade and the only time we had to practice was before classes because all of us were also already involved in other sports and extra curriculars. 10th through 12th grade I was awake at 5:45AM to get to school by 6:15 to practice from 6:30 til 7:15/7:30. There were at least half of a dozen other grouoa starting before school for the same reasons. I was also in swing choir my 11th grade year and we met after sports practice ended. A handful of us had days that started at school around 6:15AM and ended around 7:30PM!

These choirs were good and competitive at the (Ohio) state level but in retrospect I'd have rather slept later. In the case of swing choir, it was very much that I just wanted to leave the school grounds at a reasonable hour.

My experience was similar. Honors choir 6:45-7:45, school from 8:00-3:15, athletics (basketball, football, or track) from 3:30-5:30, and theater from 6:00-8:00. With homework on top, those were very long days.

Why did I do it? To distinguish myself from the masses with the hope of landing scholarships. And it worked. Only paid for state school, but things have turned out well twenty-five years later. hard work pays off. Yes, I would have rather slept in. I'm glad I didn't.

I went to highschool in the early 2010s, and I started 8:30am. Sports would start at 2:45. Senior year, because of the stress of college applications, we would start at 10am (you could still take the bus and use the extra time to meet with the college counselor if you wanted). It seems much more humane.

Why does the class portion of the day _need_ to be 8 hours long? My school is still considered one of the highest-ranked in Texas, if that matters, where it’s not uncommon for 25%+ of a graduating class to go on to Ivy’s, so I question if it’s really necessary to be sitting in class for longer than that in the first place.

> The real blame for early high school is extra-curricular sports. Basketball, Football, etc.

It seems the real blame is the culture of the US, which values sports above many things. Case in point, people openly despise toiling in academia, yet praise highly toiling in sports. Sports jockeys are popular in schools, yet IMO medalists are not (not that I care. Just to contrast culture differences). It's not enough to get into an Ivy if you are in top positions of AIME, but boy you're going to an Ivy school if are the captain of your school's whatever team.

The fact that there are universities that strongly favor athletes feels so absurd to me. In my country you could be a world class athlete and it gives you exactly zero extra points when applying to any university here. Academic success and the possible entry exams are the only things that are considered. All "extra curricular activities" are completely ignored, the mindset being that if they truly are relevant they help you in indirect ways to achieve the required level anyway. I think that's how it should be everywhere, but ofc I'm biased here. And I do like sports, both watching and playing.

It feels just wrong that somewhere kids have to market themselves into university by carefully choosing what they do in their free time, just having good grades (and actual knowledge/skills) is not enough.

Because sports is a hugely profitable business for universities. And it is profitable precisely because American people just are so into sports. So it's a virtuous or vicious cycle, depending on how you look at it. My view is actually in the middle: admit national talent, but ignore anyone below that level. This is just how sports works. No one knows who was the 100th place in Tour de France, even though that person is probably just one second behind the 1st place.

I still think universities should not be into profiting from sports. It's so weird that they are combined in some countries. After all being even exceptionally good at sports does not in any way imply that you belong into university level education in the first place. Universities should be about higher education and research.

But teenagers can easily train for sports in the evenings. Plenty of sport clubs here train in the early evening around here. Most afternoon activities start around 4 or 5. The local scouting clubs start at 18:30 or later even for primary school kids (which does sound a bit late to me).

Sounds very American, but here in Canada (and many other western countries) we have the same awful hours but without the same insane level of obsession with school sports as in the US. So I dunno, doesn't sound fully explanatory.

    here in Canada (and many other western countries) 
    we have the same awful hours but without the same 
    insane level of obsession with school sports as in the US

I've followed hockey rather closely for many decades, and respectfully, wow.

The stories I've read about youth hockey seem absolutely mental to me. Kids staying with other families (billets) hundreds of miles from home just to play hockey, etc. Bullying, abusive coaches, etc. Rampant sexual assaults. Of course many kids (the vast majority, I'm sure) have healthy experiences too.

This is not to say that either the US or Canada are better than the other in this regard, but it always seems to me that they were cut from similar cloth.

Talking about the US' "obsession with school sports" made me laugh. Usually we're painted as a sedentary nation of morbidly obese children. But apparently we're also obsessed with playing sports. Maybe Hollywood is to blame; we've all seen countless movies where the entire school is obsessed with some football game or whatever.

All I can really say is that school sports teams are completely optional. Most kids don't even participate or even care.

Yeah hockey in Canada... JFC. Especially small-town/rural Canada -- is a whole other thing. I personally grew up relatively sheltered from it, and my own kids don't participate or care -- but I grew up in rural Alberta and when I got to high school and saw how many kids around me... that was their whole life, I was kind of shocked. But it was at least a clear cultural demarcation line ... the people I liked and hung out with had nothing to do with hockey/sportsing, the people who were rampant violent homophobes ... were.

So, yeah, I guess what I'm saying is that hockey is an obsession for hockey families. For everyone else... kind of a shrug.

What I'm always shocked with with the US is the degree to which just almost everyone is into football. It's some sort of bizarre national religion, and a default smalltalk conversation topic. When I go skiing with friends in the US and we go up a chairlift with strangers, it seems almost always the icebreaker convo. When I worked at Google I was always surprised to find total CS "nerds" strike up a convo about football.

    I personally grew up relatively sheltered from [hockey] and 
    my own kids don't participate or care

Broadly speaking this sounds a lot like America's relationship with youth sports. It's totally optional and easy to avoid.

    Especially small-town/rural Canada 

    [...]

    So, yeah, I guess what I'm saying is that hockey 
    is an obsession for hockey families. For everyone 
    else... kind of a shrug.

It differs greatly regionally in America too. I live far away from Texas but I think in parts of the South and Texas, etc. high school football is like the thing. Growing up in the Northeast nobody gave that much of a crap about high school football. I went to a bunch of games but it was just kind of a place to hang out.

The small town I live in now was the childhood home of a guy who won multiple Super Bowls. Nobody gives a crap about the high school team, the one he played for. It's just not a thing.

    What I'm always shocked with with the US is the 
    degree to which just almost everyone is into football. 
    It's some sort of bizarre national religion, and a 
    default smalltalk conversation topic

It's definitely the default smalltalk conversation topic, at least for men. Feels less like "universal obsession" than "lowest common denominator" though, honestly. The comparison here is probably the other great national universal smalltalk topic, weather. You can talk about it with nearly anybody but it doesn't mean it's their biggest thing.

Honestly, I like football more than most, but even I only think about it for about 5 months a year and at least half the people in my life aren't fans.

    religion

I really do like this comparison. I think it's central to understanding its appeal to America.

BUT here's the key: it is the national religion because it is something we do together, once per week more so than because we actually worship it that deeply. In other words, it's social. An excuse to get together on Sundays (if you're in an NFL town) or Saturdays (if you're in a college town).

It's also something we enjoy together that somewhat cuts across class and ideological divides. It is certainly imperfect but in a world that is lacking in unity and common ground, I don't think this is an entirely bad thing.

It's not that... it's parents' start times at work.

A lot of places have very rigid work schedules and schools need to account for a certain percentage of parents dropping kids off and then driving to school.

Kids are sacrificed because, surprise-surprise, they have no real say in the matter.

I kindly disagree with your last statement as I see it clashing with the rest of your comment.

Kids are powerless in the decision making. Most guardians/parents are too.

As you alluded to, "both parents working" + "commute time" = outcome.

This is the rat race in action. Everyone wanting to one up everyone else. To be the top %. To get into the best colleges etc. And so it goes.

I don't see a solution unless it somehow rewrites the rules of the rat race. IE government communal action.

Exactly. I’m not a sports person, so I’m in favor of cancelling all sports. But I also realize that is a non-starter since so many more people (for reasons I don’t understand) want school sports.

That’s crazy (6:15 start time). Where did you go to school? I also graduated early 90s and our schedule was always 8:10 - 3:10. This was in TX, where football is king and education spending is not.

Wait, 8 hrs of classes? My high school was 8 am to 2:15 pm, only slightly more than 6 hours. I've never heard of a school day that was 8 hours long of classes.

Also, I don't know many office jobs where employees are home by 5 pm either. If you have a 9:30-4:00 school day with 4:00-6:00 for sports, is that a problem? Family dinner at 6:30 or 7:00 pm.

Quoting from the article:

"...A delayed school start could also mean adults with inflexible work schedules are late for work."

In my view, the whole school system largely appears to be a way to safely contain our kids, while we're working hard in the offices or elsewhere. So traditional inflexibility of office working arrangements (opening times often tied to other points of economy, like store or market hours) reflects onto the school starting times. This is especially exacerbated by work commute times.

I was once shocked to learn that some suburbian colleagues had to wake up before 5am in order to be ready in the downtown office by 8am; yep, they would drop off their kids at school too before taking train to the city, that is the kids would start before 8am or at least go for an early drop-off, either way being already awake.

Perhaps the remote work could make this more bearable but most of working parents would rather keep the established school starting hours as being fitting "ok". As for the kids, they just learn to dread the start of another school day and clockwatching it till the end.

It's exactly this, most office jobs, whether we like it or not, are 9-5. Parents need to be around to see their kids to the bus or in many cases drop them off themselves.

I'm not surprised that the top commment of an HN thread is blaming sports though...

In my school district elementary school starts first, around 8Am, then High School around 8:20, and finally middle school around 8:50. This is a fairly recent change, and result of these studies (high school used to start first). So some districts do try.

Counter argument: In our district, about 3 years ago, there was a realignment of the schedule. It revolved around cost savings for transportation, but it became just as clear that there was a secondary issue: Day care. Parents need to be able to get to work early and work late, and the school district has stepped in to provide this coverage.

Also, by pushing the start times earlier and changing transportation* the district saved about $400K/ year - which is a lot for our district.

* What the district really did was reduce the number of bus drivers to the minimum needed, as they couldn't actually afford them or find enough people willing to take on a part-time job with weird hours. This really meant more parents providing transportation before going to work, IE: the schedule became a chicken-egg problem.

My high school in Texas started at 9:05 am. Sample size of 1, but my experience was:

(a) It still felt “early” to me at the time, but not “difficult” to be up for.

(b) I don’t remember anyone complaining about school starting early or people being generally sleep deprived - if someone was exhausted in school we were all amused and curious what adventures they’d been having to stay out way too late.

(c) I do recall that there was an optional “early period” that started at 7:30 and some people took classes then or had sports stuff at that time, and I specifically remembering thinking that you had to be out of your mind to participate in anything requiring you to be up that early.

By contrast my wife, who is much more the “go to bed on time” type than I ever was, had band at 6am and school at 7:30, and describes her high school as a blur that she slept through half of.

So the article’s recommendation for a 9am start time seems pretty logical to me.

I taught in a Texas district that starts high school at 9:05. I appreciated that over the 6:50 start I had in Massachusetts... but it didn't really change much for the students.

I would get up at 5am so I could run before school and I would still be getting emails from students that hadn't gone to bed yet. I don't think any of my students in TX were getting any more sleep than the students I taught in MA. They were just staying up later. But maybe on average, the student body is getting more sleep in TX than in MA ... but no way they are getting 9 hours on school nights.

This was also my experience in Texas (DFW). Elementary school started and ended about 90 minutes before HS. This allowed the bus drivers to work from 2pm~ until 5pm.

I would have liked it to start a bit later, or at least ramp up with a homeroom for 30-45 minutes. When I started HS in 2008, we didn't have homeroom classes anymore. Some days I would start bright eyed and bushy tailed doing Calculus at 9am. Bleh.

I took some dual credit classes in my later years. I remember a few of them happened _before_ school started. Those sucked too, but they didn't cost me anything and I graduated with an associates degree so I can't complain too much.

As a teenager I was diagnosed with "ADD". Very intelligent, but unable to focus or complete assignments.

My life habits were carb heavy unhealthy food (from the cafeteria), soda, lack of sleep due to long school commute, not much exercise

As an adult, I eat no carbs, all meat and vegetables, I work from home and sleep in as far as I need every night. My thinking is laser sharp.

They tried to medicate me with all sorts of anti depression drugs and amphetamines. Turns out I was just very unhealthy, from a basic lifestyle perspective. And the school was pushing that lifestyle. My guidance counseler suggested I dont attend college, just a community college (despite the fact that I got admitted to a decent state school), or maybe go into the "trades".

These large scale school systems treat students like cattle, with zero regard for the long term effects. Many mental health concerns would disappear if people were actually healthy in the most basic sense.

> My guidance counseler suggested I dont attend college, just a community college (despite the fact that I got admitted to a decent state school)

What's wrong with guidance counselors in American high schools? Why do I keep hearing about them giving kids incredibly stupid advice?

My cynical take is that someone who cannot figure out what career to be in themselves ends up a guidance counselor.

The job isn't well paid. And anyone who can do large scale talent identification will likely be paid a lot more in the corporate world. So you end up with the least competent ones in public schools.

Selection bias?

Because a guidance counselor doing a good job is really boring, they ask you where you want to go to school, get you links to those applications, and maybe walk you through the application/point you to a campus resource that'll proofread your essays before you submit them. None of these are particularly note worthy, no one's going to go home and write about that experience, so you don't hear about it. That's what my counselor did, they got me fee waivers too so I didn't have to pay a cent for any of my applications, it's just not something I raced to write about, like I would've if they told me I shouldn't go to college and then I did well or something.

I agree. My guidance counselor had 2 3-ring binders FULL of schools that fit some criteria I had, but were also aligned to my disabilities. My mom and I spent ~2 hours with the counselor looking through the schools and applying. It was pretty boring. They also arranged for schools to come and talk to us about them. That was rad because we got to skip class

I'm often surprised that so many folks seemed to have "Guidance Counselors" at their schools. I went to a public science and technology magnet school in Kansas during the 90s and I don't think I ever saw a guidance counselor ever.

I slept through most of high school because of the long commute, but vaguely remember a counselor coming around with a computerized career recommender at our magnet school, which told me to become a telecom linesmen because I liked computers.

Yep, my HS guidance counselor gave me some great advice. I went to a school she strongly recommended for me and it was a good fit for exactly the reasons she said it would be. This isn't a very interesting story so I think this is literally the first time I've ever mentioned it anywhere in the nearly 20 years since then.

They have a strong tendency to steer high-performing students from lower-income families away from prestigious schools, despite the fact that those are often cheaper with scholarships.

I am not sure it’s necessarily bad advice in this case—community college or trade school route—I would consider that pretty good general advice for an underperforming but intelligent teen. However, I do know firsthand from an experience involving my son’s guidance counselor providing remarkably bad advice that at times the guidance isn’t beneficial to the teen, but more to the school.

Yeah I mean the guidance counselor is at best a failed therapist so why would you expect good advice

Why do you think this was stupid advice? More than a few "normal" kids go off to college and crash and burn or otherwise fail spectacularly because they aren't prepared to be on their own. It sounds totally reasonable to suggest that a kid struggling with issues like the GP might consider community college so they can stay around family support structures, continue seeing the same doctors or therapists, etc.

> just a community college

Community colleges are the best deal in higher education, and often have faculty who are interested in teaching rather than research.

Most of them are really bad at their jobs, but the pay kinda sucks, so that's not likely to improve. And with all the glamour of telling burn-outs that they're not getting into Harvard all day long, and the low pay, you also get to be point person when a kid offs themselves or dies in a car wreck. Fun!

You get what you pay for, and the pay's low. Also, the job sucks. That's a recipe for terrible service.

[EDIT] Incidentally, you want consistently-great counselors, as far as the college planning side goes? Elite prep schools. Half of what you're paying for is an expert with insider knowledge & contacts to ensure your kid gets into the best possible school they can. They treat the position—at least as far as that side of it goes—very seriously, when hiring.

"What's wrong with guidance counselors in American high schools? Why do I keep hearing about them giving kids incredibly stupid advice?"

Because most of them couldn't get a "real" job. If they could they'd be making more money somewhere else. (yes, there are some great people doing the job for ideological reasons too)

That is excellent advice in many states. For instance, here in NC you can do the first 2 years of almost any undergrad degree (all the basic non-subject matter stuff) for a fraction of the cost, and every single credit transfers. Also, much much smaller classes.

Also also: generally better teachers, becaus they are there because they actually want to teach - many are retired former professionals.

Whereas many college professors want to do research and do the academia dance, often fobbing off much of the actual teaching to TAs and the like.

I think I talked to guidance counselors twice during my entire high school career, and neither time came away satisfied, but had friends who were in and out of their offices on the regular without complaint beyond the usual ones you'd expect from teenage boys.

> Why do I keep hearing about them giving kids incredibly stupid advice?

most people with insight on good advice do not become high school guidance counselors. why would they?

> These large scale school systems treat students like cattle

I think that's by design, though, as school primarily exists as extended daycare so that parents can work.

I just think about how many people early in life are completely thrown off course because there isnt someone around to provide the basics. And it can happen in well off families.

I wonder how the experience would have went if we were in on the design of it all. We had our suspicions but I wonder if some folks would have been more compelled to take things into their own hands than passively take all the crazy environments dished out on us. Sort of in the space of informed consent, I can react to that which I'm explicitly aware of you know? Youth frequently pay the price is these sorts of information asymetries.

To steelman those school administrators/policy makers, we barely know how the human body even works and how to maintain it.

These mechanisms like diet and sleep have feedback cycles of months, year, or decades. Sometimes even lifetimes. We're extremely bad at learning from them and often fall into short-term traps that cause much bigger long-term harm.

I.e. do we, as a society, know what "a healthy diet" is? Or what "healthy sleep habits" are? I would argue we don't. If you were to survey the median person, they'd probably be pretty outdated and wrong on both. Same for doctors, who typically have their knowledge from med school and haven't kept updated much ever since. In my experience, the typical doctor doesn't know much about chronotypes besides maybe that they exist, and will recite diet dogma from the 80s or whenever he/she graduated.

So while I do agree that the impact is terrible, let's not forget that the median person simply has no idea what works, even the leading frontier of science and researchers is only slightly better off. It's like being mad at medieval peasants for not knowing about electrons or ramjets: it was very unlikely they could've known better at the time.

> My guidance counseler suggested I dont attend college

Reminder to self, tell my children to ignore anything a 'guidance councilor' says

"What do you want to do with your life"

Me: "I dunno"

"Ok, back to class"

Should they take education advice from someone who changes correctly spelled words to incorrectly spelled?

There's the old joke that if the guidance councilor was good at their job they wouldn't be working as a guidance councilor.

I never quite understood what the role was. Does anyone listen to them?

Weird. My guidance councillor did the same. Well, I wasn’t accepted to a school at the point in which they encouraged me to settle for less, but it was a very heartfelt “don’t even try”.

I left the room very confused and upset. Went in with ambition and excitement about my future and left feeling like I must be a complete idiot.

I remember her saying “Let’s focus on being realistic. You aren’t actually going to do this. You won’t accomplish any of this”.

Like you I was diagnosed with ADD, though long after this. I was inattentive, but succeeding wildly in technology classes and even went to some programming and animation “competitions” which I managed to win. She still told me to set my sights low and aim for trades or something.

For what it’s worth I managed to trick everyone else into letting me become a programmer and I did well despite the advice. It still haunts me to think that kids are getting slapped in the self esteem with advice from people like that; people who are supposed to give them objective, constructive, actionable advice in order to begin setting up their academic and professional futures.

I’d add though that unlike you, my diet more or less went the opposite direction and I feel much better too. I went completely plant-based with an emphasis on whole foods and as far as I can tell my entire body works better. I’m not saying you’re wrong because I absolutely believe you and agree that we were probably just extremely unhealthy before. Maybe any healthier diet would have sufficed. But yeah, this thing seems extremely variable from person to person. Plant based with heaps of carbs might annihilate your brain, but a bowl of barley with steamed tofu, broccoli, carrots, and peanut sauce is like heavenly brain food for me.

Exercise was the other missing link. The more I exercise the better I feel. I’m like a dog that needs to be taken or runs and swims. When my owner forgets I turn into a needy, whining, anxious, lethargic little beast of a human.

Reverse psychology works if they’re wrong and true if they’re right.

We're all winners! Here is your sticker.

World is a savage place and everyone will try to keep you down. There are lucky few that are surrounded by a support group that cares and safety nets at every corner.

Its actually a elitist, slap down machine. Cause academic families will not fear such a slap. After all, everyone you know has studied. And some of them are idiots, you know those. So why shouldn't you.

But the one person from a poor household, who never went far in life. No matter how bright, will have noone to put them back upright again. Its pure evil and very unamerican and anti-meritocratic. Its also a thing, thats very common in european societys with rigid class structures, like Britain.

They sort you in, just for your dialect and your place of birth. And look what it got them..

Exactly

> Cause academic families will not fear such a slap

It's also that, to an academic family, a high school counselor won't even register as a "person of authority". It's a pretty low skill position, and they will likely assume they have more knowledge than the counselor regarding college (which wouldn't be a bad assumption).

> Its also a thing, thats very common in european societys with rigid class structures, like Britain.

It's something that has been echoed to my by brits here in the Valley. They described coming to America as freeing, which confused me at first because I know the BBC and British medias generally aren't so positive on America. Guess the brain flow doesn't lie.

Be all you can be, not just born and buried.

> I’d add though that unlike you, my diet more or less went the opposite direction and I feel much better too. I went completely plant-based with an emphasis on whole foods and as far as I can tell my entire body works better. I’m not saying you’re wrong because I absolutely believe you and agree that we were probably just extremely unhealthy before. Maybe any healthier diet would have sufficed. But yeah, this thing seems extremely variable from person to person. Plant based with heaps of carbs might annihilate your brain, but a bowl of barley with steamed tofu, broccoli, carrots, and peanut sauce is like heavenly brain food for me.

The great thing about the SAD (Standard American Diet) is that most any not-totally-insane restrictive diet will be significantly better. It hardly even matters which you choose, it will be better. When you start with terrible, even "bad" is an improvement!

It's true. I think we collectively know this too, but trick ourselves into thinking we're not the ones eating the SAD. In reality, most of us are; it's sort of like we think we aren't the traffic. McDonalds doesn't serve billions because none of us eat there, and the grocery store doesn't have aisles of garbage because no one's eating it. I think we also have a tendency to under estimate just how frequent our indulgences are, even if we generally eat a bit better than the SAD. This is how we gradually become obese. It's definitely a weakness in the human psyche.

A major eye opener for me after the last couple of years has been how crazy our diets really tend to be and how easy it is to just stop it. Like, I used to battle internally about if I ate well enough that day to eat [insert garbage here]. Like that's ever a conversation worth having with yourself, or it would ever make sense to want the garbage in the first place. But I figured I was eating whole foods (usually, I guess, maybe?), eating meat from "good" and "ethical" sources, eating what I thought was a lot of vegetables.

And yet the science shows that people who eat like I did are dying earlier than they need to and suffering from diseases people didn't typically get up until recently. And I found myself gradually gaining weight despite not noticing a change in my caloric intake.

I'm not sure exactly what caused me to snap out of it (there were several factors), but in any case, I'm glad I did. And you're right – eating well is trivial if you're starting anywhere near the SAD. With a bit of motivation you can level up tremendously with minimal effort.

A bit of an aside but it’s so strange to me seeing ‘trades’ referred to as a lowly thing. Here in Australia, tradies are admired, often earn really good money and get a lot of good attention. They can work hard and put in the hours to get ahead whereas us IT guys on salary have a much more ‘fixed’ earning potential.

I have no aversion to trades and actually worked in joinery for many years before I began programming professionally. I don’t mean to look down on it at all. I actually find it absurd that I earn as much as I do compared to say, a red seal carpenter here in Canada where their breadth of skill and knowledge means more and accomplishes more than my own skill set in very tangible and crucial ways.

If I could support my family as well in trades I might have considered staying — I loved working the giant industrial CNC machine and began to love learning to set it up and create CAD drawings for it. I probably would have enjoyed a career headed in that direction, but I could have ended up earning around 1/3 of what I do now… At best.

Oh just to clarify - I didn’t think you were looking down on the trades at all, it’s the sentiment expressed by the school guidance counsellor that I found strange. I’ve heard it is a very culturally-dependent thing, to be fair.

Your comment reminded me of going with my dad to a place that had a huge laser-cutting machine when I was young. They were awesome!

I totally agree, the sentiment is strange. I've noticed that it seems to be shifting; when I was a teen there was an obsession with becoming a knowledge worker of some sort and getting an education. That fever appears to be subsiding now, and I hope that's reflected in how rewarding and sustainable trades careers can be in the near future here. In my city it would be quite difficult a the moment to get by in most trades without dual incomes, and you'd need to live away from any central schools. Buying a home is nearly impossible without a 150k+ CAD income, and the trades will rarely get you half way there without significant experience.

Something that blew my mind recently is that I left joinery with a job earning about 65k CAD per year (around 2008). I recently met a guy getting his red seal and he earns about 62k CAD. He hopes to hit 80k within a few years of getting his seal by making lateral moves and bargaining better, but isn't certain it's even possible. This is insane to me. Not only has the value of his work decreased, but even with better credentials than I had he's earning less. This is the completely wrong direction for things to go!

I was also shocked to find that he spends about 36% of his pre-tax income on rent, and when I was earning 65k I was spending about 8% of my pre-tax income on rent. I lived an hour away and shared rent with a room mate in a small house, whereas he lives alone in a small apartment in our expensive city. But wow. What a striking difference; it almost seems impossible to get ahead despite that he's educated, competent, and working hard at improving himself. I feel like that needs to change or we won't see kids move into the trades and, you know, hold up our society here!

Also I totally agree about giant laser cutters. I can't get enough of CNC machines of all sorts. I really, really want to build one some day.

Admittedly the "on salary" is the key here. Trade wage slaves don't earn a huge amount - it's the ones that act more like a freelancer or their own contracting company that can do. A bit like when that IT guy moves into doing consulting contracts.

That's specific to Australia. In the US "trades" can be very well paying if you're self-employed, but it's low class and hard to get into, something that'd have to run into your family.

And we actually pay tech workers well.

Was this meeting before lunch? Maybe she was just hungry. As terrifying as that is.

> As an adult, I eat no carbs, all meat and vegetables

This is contradictory. Vegetables are high in carbohydrates as a percentage of their calories.

Non-starch vegetable have almost no carbs and almost no calories.

But they have the fiber and other green goodness you need.

Betting here that "no carbs" = no bread or other grain products.

We've ruined multiple generations by not explaining that our bodies don't care that much about what form our nutrients take. Getting the meat sweats from an Italian sub doesn't mean it was unhealthy, it's just your body's reaction to processing it which can be a desirable feeling (say on Thanksgiving) or not.

People who switch to "healthy" and feel better pretty much fall into three categories.

* Their new diet is less enjoyable and they simply eat less and burning fat feels good.

* They accidentally switched to a FODMAP diet and associate the lack of "reaction" from food as a sign of health.

* They have been criminally deprived of fiber and are now regular for the first time in recent memory.

Low carb doesn't mean you can't eat food with carbs, it means most of your diet is protein and fat, and you restrict carbohydrate consumption. He can have a low carbohydrate diet while eating vegetables, as long as he eats less vegetables than meat.

He said he eats no carbs.

Yes but 'no carbs' doesn't mean 'low carb'.

> My guidance counseler suggested I dont attend college, just a community college (despite the fact that I got admitted to a decent state school), or maybe go into the "trades".

While I can only assume the people at that school to have been clueless as to your personal preferences and capabilities I do not see anything wrong with advising someone to skip college and learn a trade. College is not for everyone, college is not needed for many types of employment and college is all too often only used as a filtering device to reduce the number of interview candidates to manageable proportions. Add to that the fact that many colleges have ditched or are on the way to ditching objectivity and the scientific method to replace it with a post-modern portion of bullshit bingo in the name of D.I.E. and such and it suddenly becomes sage advice for many to skip this needless and needlessly expensive step. If you're aspiring to build bridges, heal the sick or raise the dead you'd better get yourself a degree, preferably one which actually means something. If you're planning to go into sales, start a small business or tend to a farm you don't need college.

This is the biggest issue with developing countries. Nobody really understand how important chronic diseases and a good diet is. In terms of this for majority of its population US is also just like an ordinary developing country. Very similar to Saudi Arabia. Majority of vegetables are also not very innocent. Maybe not comparable to processed junk food with tons of sugar but there is almost no developed country with high vegetable intake yet Vegetables are advertised as healthy and people in developing countries fall victim to it. Fortunately our body is very versatile but i don't think a sensitive organ like brain can keep its ideal condition over time.

Modern psychiatry entirely ignores mechanism. All diagnoses are sets of symptoms, and treatments are drugs that reduce specific symptoms. It isn’t surprising that in many cases the causes would be obvious, but there isn’t any type of system for even trying to approach mental health that way.

Another problem is the feedback loop of mental illness. A lot of people might feel better if they got exercise, ate healthy, got enough sleep, made some friends, took on some fun hobbies, etc. but most people aren’t willing or able to do any of that if they are stuck in a bad mental state.

> Another problem is the feedback loop of mental illness. A lot of people might feel better if they got exercise, ate healthy, got enough sleep, made some friends, took on some fun hobbies, etc. but most people aren’t willing or able to do any of that if they are stuck in a bad mental state.

I've found CBT super helpful for my ADHD because it focuses on the small steps to break that loop. I thoroughly recommend it for ADHD and mental illness, particularly for engineers as it's far more system based and obviously "logical" than any other form of therapy I've tried.

I was never diagnosed with ADD, but I had a long commute to school (2+ hours each way - I was closest to the bus barn, so first on in morning, last off at night). So I was on the bus at 5:15am, and not getting home until 5:45-6:30pm, just in time to eat dinner and go to bed so that I could wake up at 4:30am to get my shower, and walk a half mile to the bus stop.

The fact that they would pull that shit on 13 year old kids, then tell them they are dumb and fail them is ridiculous. Thankfully I had a few teachers that would stand up for me, but most of them though I was a lazy burn-out and would never amount to anything, and almost no teacher had empathy for me. I should be doing my school work on the bumpy bus that spent more than half its time on rural dirt roads.

When I got my first real job, I was glad to realize how wrong they all were. But it shattered my confidence.

I used to be really big on trust the experts, seek authorities for advice, etc etc. Especially for areas involving mental / general health. Specifics like fixing a broken arm I’m still on the experts side :)

Decades later I’ve had many (eerily similar) experiences to what you detailed above. I’ve gotten the best results evaluating issues on my own / with the help of a few trusted sources. Expert advice is about as reliable as chatgpt (in the majority of cases). There’s too many devils in the details when it comes to complex issues like health. Find people who got results or find results yourself.

I think the majority of modern healthcare exists to make a profit and curing patients isn’t really a good business model. Unfortunately they can use those profits to create an army of experts and studies.

I don’t distrust modern medical community, but I think it often suffers from overconfidence that leads me to more carefully scrutinize (but not outright reject) expert opinion.

I’ve been listening to a podcast called Sawbones where they talk through the history of medicine. It’s basically a tour of all the ways we got things wrong. My conclusion has been: and why are we so confident that this time we’re right? Seems like every generation is confident that finally, they’ve got it right.

If we expect every day to be an improvement, the needle has been moved forward that much more, how else would history function except a retelling of mistakes, missteps, and wrongdoings?

I think modern medicine suffers heavily from generalising patients - so much advice attempts to be so one-size-fits-all that it fits almost nobody.

Like story of the fighter cockpit that was designed to perfectly fit the average dimensions of all pilots and was uncomfortable for everyone - no person is average in all dimensions.

On top of that is the absolutist advice - "never do X, always do Y" (particularly when the result of doing X is not shared - it could be a minor inconvenience, or a fatal error, they seem to be treated the same) rather than a nuanced process of tradeoffs and balancing outcomes.

>and why are we so confident that this time we’re right?

I don't have to be confident that the current scientific consensus is entirely correct to believe that it's virtually guaranteed to be more correct than whatever alternative I'd come up with in some area I completely lack expertise.

> I think the majority of modern healthcare exists to make a profit and curing patients isn’t really a good business model. Unfortunately they can use those profits to create an army of experts and studies.

Not all healthcare is for-profit healthcare. I agree incentive alignment is an issue when we're talking about for-profit healthcare, but in other cases medical professionals treat patients to the best of their ability.

> I think the majority of modern healthcare exists to make a profit

100%. Healthcare is a big, big business.

You don't want to trust experts for mental/general health, and you encourage people find others who "got results". In essence, you have just made random people the experts, but worse, allowed them to run freely without any risk of reputation harm. I can sue a doctor for malpractice, I can't sue user21389 for false results. Why do you so quickly believe these experiences of randoms?

This idea modern healthcare exists to make a profit doesn't apply in all cases, and you imply they use these profits to create a false narrative of experts. But yet ignore that exact same thing is happening with the supplement industry (not regulated btw), of people claiming their ADHD was cured by taking a couple of supplements - "it's better than being drugged by Big Pharma" they say. This individualistic mindset only encourages these predatory companies to swoop in and say hey, I know exactly the right cure smoke this, crush these herbs, drink that.

Made even worse by the fact people aren't honest about how their meds have helped them get to a stage where they have replaced old routines with better ones, started therapy, etc. Yet they look back, post on social media "antidepressants are the worst - quit now!"

Forgive me if this is harsh, I've seen way too many people spend way too much money and time on BS when they could have got serious help.

Don't get me wrong, finding a diet that works for you, being more active, being more social, these are all great things nobody disagrees on. But this idea I'm supposed to trust a random person online, cured of his ADD, because he started eating less bread is one I am going to treat with the same severe skepticism you hold regarding mental health experts. :)

I don't think they were telling you to do this. They were just giving their own experience.

You the reader get to read their experience and decide if you would do that or not.

I think most Americans have their head in the sand when it comes to healthcare. I agree with you completely btw, as an American expat living abroad. It's so bloody obvious how the profit motive distorts all of US medicine when you are not living in that system anymore. Honestly, it's like something out of a corpo-capitalist dystopian film.

I wouldn't trust a US doctor or dentist (oh god, US dentists are probably the scummiest healthcare professionals on the planet) unless it's something very obvious.

Socialized healthcare still has a "profit motive" unless everyone involved is paid unrelated to any performance metrics. Which would be a weird way to do it.

(And most hospitals in the US are nonprofits, which certainly doesn't stop them from being way too expensive.)

Curing patients is a great business model. If you don't do it someone else will, and they'll take your customers.

My high school math teacher told me I wouldn't make it to university.

I ended up with a math heavy engineering degree. First class honours.

I'm home schooling my kids . They will do better with their parents as teachers. My friends have done it and their kids were academically ready for university years before their peers.

/? ADHD and sleep; REM / non-REM: https://www.google.com/search?q=adhd+and+sleep

Sleep hygiene: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_hygiene https://www.google.com/search?q=sleep+hygiene

- Enough exercise and water

- Otherwise, limit calories and/or protein in the preceding hours

Sleep induction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_induction

Pranayama; breathing yoga: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pranayama

4-7-8 breathing: https://www.google.com/search?q=4-7-8+breathing

Attributed both to Army and Navy: https://www.fastcompany.com/90253444/what-happened-when-i-tr... :

> The Independent says the technique was first described in a book from 1981 called "Relax and Win: Championship Performance" by Lloyd Bud Winter.

/? "Relax and Win: Championship Performance" https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Relax+and+Win%3A+Champion... https://archive.org/details/Relax-and-Win_Championship-Perfo...

>As an adult, I eat no carbs, all meat and vegetables, I work from home and sleep in as far as I need every night. My thinking is laser sharp.

I need carbs to think.

If I do not have rice for 3-4 days, I can not do research work. I can write code, or read papers, but new ideas or brainstorming others' ideas don't happen as naturally.

Could be a genetic thing, I guess.

Maybe they mean no starch because vegetables certainly have carbs. For example, a cup of broccoli has 6g of carbs, a cup of kale has 1g, and about 5g in a tomato. Certainly a low-carb diet, but not no carbs.

Why the hell would you measure broccoli or kale in cups?

The most effective methods of treatment for ADHD:

* Medication

* Exercise

* Healthy diet

* Healthy consistent sleep

Is it possible that you weren't just unhealthy? Is it possible that diet, exercise, and sleep had exactly the positive effect that they are generally expected to have?

I say this not to reinforce the "maybe" of your own personal ADD/ADHD diagnosis, but to open the door for empathy. You may indeed have been misdiagnosed. You may have a more mild case of ADHD than the mean/average case. You may have a relatively severe case, but experience significant enough relief from your current diet, exercise, and sleep to adequately manage it. Whatever the case may be, I want everyone here to know that it just isn't enough to say, "Just be more healthy." Life is more diverse and complex than that.

The primary effect of ADHD is "executive dysfunction". If the best treatment for ADHD is to eat healthy, exercise more, and get consistent sleep, we must still recognize that that very treatment itself exists behind a wall of executive dysfunction. Even if "healthy lifestyle" is enough, we still need a way to bootstrap it.

It's incredibly normal for anyone with an unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, or lack of sleep to struggle changing any of those things. Someone with ADHD literally has a disorder that makes it incredibly difficult to even get started.

While medication has an immediate and direct benefit, getting through that metaphorical wall to the rest of treatment is widely seen as the primary utility medication provides.

---

Whatever your situation is, it sounds like you managed fine without medication. Lucky you. For a lot of us, life just isn't that simple.

When I try to eat my vegetables, I can put them on a plate, hype myself up for them, and then sit staring while my brain shuts down. I am God, and broccoli is damned. When I decide I want to exercise more, I can get dressed, go outside, even get inside a gym, and pace around the weights or the treadmills, or the swimming pools, and get lost deciding what to do, while my brain screams, "I know! leave." When I decide I want to get to sleep on time, I can lie in my bed, breathe deep, relax, start thinking about more things than I can count, while the amount of hours and minutes slide right off the ledger.

Medication doesn't solve any of that, but it makes some of it possible.

One big reason this shift isn't happening is that it creates coordination problems: for many families, everyone leaves for school at the same time, so if you move grade 9 forward an hour, you have to do the same with grade 4 to get any benefit; the 9th grader is taking the 4th grader to school. That problem stopped this shift dead recently where I live.

Yeah, IIRC Boston actually tried this, and the uproar from parents whose schedules were thrown into disarray was so intense it had to immediately be walked back. It sucks, but there are broader considerations at play.

Sounds like parents have too much to worry about since both parents have to work or their house will be foreclosed on.

Ive read some speculation that the women's right to work movement was just a ploy to double the workforce. Not only that, thet get double the workers for less money since nearly all women are paid less than their male counterparts.

It could have had something to do with women desiring independence.

Ofcouse. however they may have been misguided to think their families would benefit from both parents working while it was actually a detriment to their family in the end. Again, not saying women should t be able to work like anyone else, I'm saying having g both parents have to go to work does not benefit the family unit as they hoped. Especially since women are paid nearly half as much as men across nearly every industry.

Who is “they”, and why do you presume “they” pushed for women being able to work because it would benefit families?

I want women to be able to work because I want the women in my life to not be caught under the thumb of an abuser. If it harms families somehow, that is a separate problem, with separate solutions that do not have anything to do with restricting the independence of women.

>Especially since women are paid nearly half as much as men across nearly every industry.

This is not true when comparing the price of the same labor offered by a man or woman.

"They" in this context are the people who benefit from an increased labor pool (capitalists, who want lower wages for everyone) and those who thought it was done for their benefit.

>This is not true when comparing the price of the same labor offered by a man or woman.

Okay, maybe not HALF, but you can't argue with the gender wage gap. Men make ~20% more than women.

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/data/occupations

> Men make ~20% more than women.

This is so disingenuous it really shouldn't be repeated. The pay gap within the same job is miniscule. Men and women make different career choices. There's just no accounting for the lack of women applying for high-paying positions as roughnecks.

Well the numbers are coming from the dept of labor so idk what you're talking about.

what are the numbers within the same role?

I want to counter the “women’s right to work movement was just a ploy to double the workforce” because it implies that there is a double meaning or some wild conspiracy. In reality, women being financially independent is highly protective against financial abuse. Financial Abuse occurs in the vast majority of domestic violence cases and a majority of victims who return to their abusers do so because of financial insecurity. With the additional risk that the majority of women who are murdered are murdered by their abusive partners, a woman’s right to work is a matter of survival. That it has additional consequences societally, such as workforce doubling, doesn’t mean that there aren’t women behaving independently for their own benefits more so than there are “they” who manipulate half the population for some nebulous capitalist gain.

It's odd that parents consider broader considerations like their 9-5 schedule more important than the health and well-being of their own children. With all the resources and technology we have it's not as if we don't have the ability to find solutions to problems like "How to move a child from point A to point B at time C", so I guess this is more of a lack of will than a lack of capability.

> It's odd that parents consider broader considerations like their 9-5 schedule more important than the health and well-being of their own children.

Why are you blaming the parents? Most people in the world don't have the benefit of flexible tech jobs that allow them to work 10-6 or to come and go as needed during the work day.

> Why are you blaming the parents?

Because when Boston tried this, uproar from parents was sufficient to cause meaningful change, but that uproar was directed at their schools and not their workplaces. They used their collective power to defend their work schedules at the expense of their children.

Why not insist on more flexibility in their work schedules, or for additional transportation solutions to assist in getting teens to/from schools? Is this really an insurmountable problem?

> Because when Boston tried this, uproar from parents was sufficient to cause meaningful change, but that uproar was directed at their schools and not their workplaces.

School officials are locally democratically accountable. Employers generally are not, and are often able to play workers in different localities (and even states and countries, in many cases) against each other to create a race-to-the-bottom effect.

Parents directed their force against the movable object, not the immovable one.

> Parents directed their force against the movable object, not the immovable one.

But it was the wrong one, while making victims in the process.

> It’s odd that parents consider broader considerations like their 9-5 schedule more important than the health and well-being of their own children.

For most parents, the ability to maintain the work schedule demanded by their employer is rather central to, not a separate unrelated interest from, the health and well-being of their children.

When we have both the economic structure to support and a government run by a political ideology that will allow a robust UBI that makes this optional (and thereby forces employers to accommodate it if they want to have employees at all), we can discuss the issues as if they were separate. But in the concrete would we live in, they are not.

I agree that UBI would mean a huge amount of leverage for employees, but I get the feeling if we see it at all it'll come after most of us are replaced by AI/automation and will be forced out of work entirely. We shouldn't wait for UBI to draw boundaries around what we'll give up to enrich our employers though, and our children's health seems like a good candidate for a line we could draw and rally behind defending.

It could've happened if the transition to remote work was allowed to keep going, but too many companies were invested in commercial real estate (e.g via REITs etc) to let it happen.

^^gross oversimplification, but I'm standing by it

Most people in the US work in businesses shelpping shit around (Amazon, WalMart, UPS, etc.). Work from home simply isn't in the cards for them, ever.

Yes, that much is true. But their schedules are also not necessarily fixed at 9-5.

So there's something to be said for labor where it very easily could be flexible but arbitrarily isn't.

This is why we have school busses. Why are children being tasked with transporting other children to school?

Not OP, but OP may have meant:

Sometimes older siblings contribute to childcare. A 9th grader that is home at 3pm, can watch a 4th grader that is home at 4pm until parents arrive home at 5pm.

School busses are shared across age ranges. So teenagers get the first bus, then middle schoolers get one an hour later, then grade schoolers.

So if you punt the highschool bus to later, you are either making for a very late school day, or making younger kids wake up earlier.

Or the solution could be to triple the cost of school transportation.

Or locate schools closer to where people live. It seems like it ought to be possible to locate at least elementary schools within walking distance of the kids homes.

Well, most do. But culturally we are moving in the opposite direction - there are quite a few stories of parents getting cited or arrested for letting their kids walk to school on their own.

> Or the solution could be to triple the cost of school transportation.

Yes, let's try to kill the one form of public transportation we have in the USA that works decently and is widely available.

> So teenagers get the first bus, then middle schoolers get one an hour later, then grade schoolers.

Where I grew up it was the opposite. Grade schoolers started first at 8:00, middle-schoolers at 8:30, high-schoolers at 9:00. As a high schooler you finish school at 4PM, hardly a very late school day. Younger kids naturally go to sleep and wake up earlier than teens anyways, it's not unfair or harmful to have them start school earlier.

This showcases other problems with American society. With poor social support structures and urban design, kids can't simply walk to and from school, take public transportation, or ride school provided transportation to remove parents being chauffeurs.

That would not fix the coordination problem - if the family includes one of each (elementary, middle and high school kids) you still have to make breakfast for them, get everyone ready and head out. Let’s say they all don’t have to leave at the same time, but most other activities have to be coordinated and the sheer noise in the household will wake people up, not to mention it’s a bit easier to feed all 3 kids together.

That again relates to social support structures. In fact, many kids' parents can't afford breakfast or even lunch.

It seems there are programs that exist already to help feed kids breakfast and lunch at schools.

https://www.fns.usda.gov/programs

https://www.projectbread.org/

> That again relates to social support structures. In fact, many kids' parents can't afford breakfast or even lunch.

That's not what the GP is talking about. They're saying that there is an overhead to people leaving at different times.

It would have solved it completely for my family - we just ate cereal or a bagel in the morning for breakfast, no coordination necessary.

>if the family includes one of each (elementary, middle and high school kids) you still have to make breakfast for them, get everyone ready and head out.

Surely high school aged kids can make their own breakfast.

Surely the high school aged kids can make sure to not oversleep and be responsible enough to ensure that their parents won't get a call at 9:15 when they've failed to show up on time.

The vast majority of them are... to the detriment of their health and learning. Did you read the article?

I am recalling some of my coworkers at a previous job where they (the parents) started early in the day and would get a call mid morning either from the school or the child ("oops, I missed the bus").

As that workplace wasn't extremely flexible with time, this involved rescheduling any meetings coming up, leaving, driving home (30 min), getting kid to school (15 min), getting back to work (45 min) if everything was good. Taking an hour and a half to two hours out of a person's work day can be very disruptive.

The issue isn't 9:00 rather than 8:00 or 8:30 but rather a refutation of "are teenagers responsible enough to get to school on their own without any parental coaxing."

Consider the chain of comments:

> > > if the family includes one of each (elementary, middle and high school kids) you still have to make breakfast for them, get everyone ready and head out.

> > Surely high school aged kids can make their own breakfast.

> Surely the high school aged kids can make sure to not oversleep and be responsible enough to ensure that their parents won't get a call at 9:15 when they've failed to show up on time.

---

If you're getting all the kids up and ready to go to school at 8:00 am, you've missed the advantage of having a teenager sleep in and get to school at 9:00 am.

If you (the parent) aren't making sure that the teenager is getting to school at 9:00 because you're at work, and aren't getting them up at 8:00 am (with the rest of the kids), then you're going to deal with "teenager slept through all the alarms."

Most high schoolers are capable of feeding themselves breakfast and getting out the door. And in my experience, aren't going to let themselves be woken up early by the younger ones getting ready for school.

> you still have to make breakfast for them, get everyone ready

Past a certain age they can do this themselves. A 12 year old is very capable of doing everything besides driving a car

Got any citations to back that up? I remember everyone in high school in Philadelphia commuting via public transit. And what do you meant can't walk to school? The whole city is a grid, completely covered with sidewalks. Go pull up an online map if you've never seen it before. The only thing impeding people from walking everywhere is the fear of getting mugged or worse in certain neighborhoods.

You probably know this, but Philadelphia is a particularly large & dense city - which is not really representative of the country at large. There was an article about 15 minute cities on HN a few days ago. Philly is a lot closer to a 15 minute city (especially if you include public trans to walking and biking in the defnition) than most other places in the country. That's a great thing, and I wish more places in the US were like Philly.

It is heavily resisted by sports parents, especially. They like the extra afternoon time after school that an early start provides. It's one of the main reasons I've seen these kinds of proposals shot down before it could really get going, locally.

> everyone leaves for school at the same time, so if you move grade 9 forward an hour, you have to do the same with grade 4 to get any benefit; the 9th grader is taking the 4th grader to school. That problem stopped this shift dead recently where I live.

Where?! Around here they don't have enough busses for everyone to go at once. Young kids start late (which sucks, because they've already burnt at least one of their best and most-alert hours of the day by then) and older kids start early (which also sucks, of course). They could flip it—after all, the older kids are the ones best-equipped to get themselves to school after the parents leave for work—but see again the sports-parents' (and, within the schools, coaches and athletic directors') objections.

Sports have become way too important in high school. In addition to bad ideas about start times, site selection for schools based on having huge amounts of land for sports fields means far away schools instead of being centrally located near a lot of people so students can walk to school easily.

We have one local district with a weirdly-far-removed area with a couple local schools but who have to travel really far to get to the high school, which is farther out of the city in an exurb town. That's (the town) also where all the sports facilities are.

Everyone concerned would clearly be better off if this little area could be absorbed by another district (it has two better-fit candidates bordering it! Of the three plausible options, it's connected to the silliest one! And, hell, those two are both better ranked, academically than the one it's attached to, by a long shot!) or become its own mini-district—the ones up in the town hate the ones from "down South" (and, yes, there's very explicitly a racist element to this for some of them—which is fucking absurd anyway, the area's majority white and includes some neighborhoods far richer than the average of the town, but having lived in a different but similarly-situated far-removed exurb growing up, I know exactly the kind of messed-up ideas they get about "the city") and resent sending any district money that way, while having to go way North for high school sucks for the ones down South, both due to the sheer distance and because of the, ahem, cultural differences.

Why will they never separate? Losing those kids would drop the district into a less-prestigious sports conference, since they'd be smaller. No way they wouldn't fight any change, tooth and nail, despite plainly thinking the kids from farther south are shit. Plus they, ah, rely on that geographically-nonsensical southern annex for player recruitment. Yes, the whole thing's just as gross, in fact, as that reads. All because of fucking school sports.

I'm quite confused about this, since I'm from a place where nearly everybody is a lone child.

But what if the 4th grader doesn't have a 9th grader sibling? Like what do the family do when the 9th grader was a 4th grader? Do parents literally drive them every day to school? Isn't there some kind of school bus system that transports kids from and to their school?

If.. uhh… society wasn’t so capitalistically expensive as to require the entire household’s adults to work, a lot of these logistical concerns would work out. Resulting in smarter and healthier children.

But: smart and healthy children demand wages as adults that cut into shareholder profits…

> If.. uhh… society wasn’t so capitalistically expensive as to require the entire household’s adults to work

It is a tragedy of the commons problem. As soon as the other spouse starts working, the family has more money, but once every family thinks to have both partners working, sellers will catch on and increase their prices, bringing you back to the initial problem but now with one fewer spouse at home. It's not a capitalism problem, it's a general markets problem.

Sellers aren't free to increase prices whenever they feel like it. Most of them are price takers.

Not sure what you mean exactly. It's already happened currently where a lot of areas require both parents to work to have good living standards, which wasn't the case before widespread dual incomes.

That's a coincidence. It's because the US realized they could drive up home values by banning new homes in the 60s and the effects took a while to create a housing shortage.

I'm not only talking about the US, it's a worldwide phenomenon after dual incomes had been more prevalent.

Plenty of families that don't need two incomes have two working parents; parents work because work is fulfilling.

Both parents work because prices adjust to demand.

That is, if both parents work, prices can rise because demand rises (remember demand is the desire to buy, but also the ability to pay). When prices rise, this puts an even greater pressure on single income families. ie: their single income has to be stretched father because they are competing with two income demand. This is economics 101.

While two incomes increases the spending abilities of the household relative to single income households, it comes with the additional instability of the household depending on both incomes (perhaps they purchase a larger home that requires both incomes to support) while exposing the household to the increased risk of either one of them being fired or laid off.

This is a well-studied phenomenon beyond the interpretation that "work is fulfilling."

Nah. This sounds plausible, but it flunks an obvious empirical check: families where one earner brings in all the meaningful income and the other earner makes barely enough more to pay for the child care costs their work incurs. I know a bunch of families like this. Surely some parents work because they have to, but it's also obvious that many other parents work because that's what they need to do to lead a fulfilling life.

As someone who has been a caregiver for school-aged kids (mine are adults now): just what is it that you'd expect a stay-at-home parent to do once all the kids are in K-12 school? The kids are gone for most of the day.

> I know a bunch of families like this.

I'm not arguing that all families make the decision to become dual-income households. I'm arguing that there are major economic incentives that push people toward dual-income. This allows for your experience and the observation of counter-examples to co-exist with broad social shifts in family-work structure. The reason it appears true is because it is.

You don't have to accept my word for it.

The other possibility is reading what economists have to say[1] about the effects of inflationary pressures on household income structures. Sorry, but I'm going to put more trust in an expert than someone with anecdotal evidence.

1. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/088636871990003...

For sure. Everyone can, indeed, decide their own priorities. Some choose work over children others have to choose work over children.

No, when both parents work it means wages are high, that's all.

When one parent doesn't work, it's because the marginal wage added wouldn't pay for childcare.

In recessions one-parent households actually increase, because it's not caused by things being too expensive.

> pay for childcare > wages are high

Pay for…. That’s your clue. Prices are expensive because the owning class is squeezing every dime they can get.

You know… bog standard capitalism…

I don't think the capitalist class controls the price of childcare services?

You neglect to consider for profit day care. Profit desires dictate price. Labor is paid as little as possible, by an owner…

You can find counterarguments like this for any entrenched problem that has an obvious solution. When people want the solution they'll figure out those issues themselves.

To answer some of the questions posed to this comment, I really think the problem is many school districts do not have enough buses and drivers to transport their entire student body at the same time.

By having secondary start first, you require 50% less buses.

If we were to switch secondary goes second and primary age students go first, your primary age children would leave for school around 7am and arrive home at 3pm. Most parents are not home at 3pm and this causes a large problem for families. In some instances, the older children who are in secondary schools -- watch the younger children until parents get home.

Why not ditch the buses and just start everyone around the same time? In Australia, all levels are starting around 8:45am (3-18yo). There's a bit of flexibility in that a school yard is monitored a bit earlier, or the first session is free play ("Investigation") which allows children to be dropped off sequentially if parents are handling that. Ends up being a window of about 8:35-8:55 so my school run can get two both schools in time.

There is affordable and easy to book out of school hours care for anything earlier or later.

Outside of formal lessons, I'd fill gaps with investigative play, extracurricular at-school sport, or casual activities to line up various year levels.

The sequencing in districts where high schools start earliest, then middle schools, then elementary feels backwards to me though.

Elementary school parents who have jobs to get to wind up needing preschool care to fill that gap between their departure time and school start - high school age siblings aren’t even available to cover. Late elementary school drop off times impact parents’ options for work and commuting.

High school age kids can (or certainly should be able to) get themselves to school, so later starts don’t interfere with other family routines.

The staggering works best for the return from school. There are 2-3 hours at the end of the day where school is out but mom's not home yet, and having the high schooler finished by the time the 3rd grader is out means they can fill in that gap.

Elementary age kids whose parents work are going to need afterschool care. I think that’s inevitable, and honestly solvable. Teenage siblings are a fairly limited part of that solution.

I think forcing all the additional logistical complexity and cost of pre-school-day care is an accidental and unnecessary layer though.

High school children spending hours a day covering childcare duties for their parents should not be the policy goal. That circumstance is a failure for the younger children to have proper activities/supervision after school.

My controversial opinion is that the policy goal should be to enable at least one parent to stay at home. I couldn't care less which parent it is, but kids need one at home.

The obvious solution is extdended day care at school, on both sides, not focing5 older kids to run parenting around their own school commute.

Biden tried that. Manchin shut it down. For now this is the best we can have.

I think high school generally starts earliest so that sports/extracurriculars can practice after school for two hours before the sun sets. Elementary schoolers just go home.

So find another solution to the coordination problem.

Sorry teens, school isn't about your wellbeing. It's about glorified childcare (if we let out later, who will watch the younger kids? Before it may have been a parent, but now both parents are away at work) and athletics (later start times means your kid will come back from sports practice when it's dark).

I was a nerdy, awkward kid with a lot of social anxiety, that experienced a lot of bullying and hazing at school. I would stay up all night playing on the computer, and just sleep in class during school. At home I would draw the blinds and stay in my messy room alone, in the dark. I was overweight, had bad acne, and had no energy.

I was in a lot of pain, and felt like absolute shit, but nobody seemed to understand or care. They would tell me I needed to stop being "lazy" and clean my room, and do my homework. I wanted to really bad... but didn't know why I couldn't focus. I felt an enormous amount of guilt, like I was a total failure.

As an adult, I was able to turn all of that around by focusing on basic health things- exercise, sleep, diet, and processing emotions. It seems like I was just extra sensitive to those issues, more so than most people. As a father, I hope I can help my son from going through the same.

Weird did I write this?

> This shift reverses at adulthood. The biological nature of this daily rhythm means that sending a teenager to bed earlier won’t necessarily mean they fall asleep earlier.

No, this shift does not reverse in adulthood for some people... I am in my 30's and I still fall asleep midnight to 1 AM, and wake up "late" by most adult standards at around 8/9 AM.

I can not shift my sleep schedule to earlier, I've tried many times, it's just not how I am wired.

do you consume any caffeine after 12:00 noon? Caffeine's half life is 6 hours. So if you consume at 3pm, you still have 1/2 that caffeine in your body at 9 pm. 1/4 of it at 3am.

I have similar sleeping habits, and I generally have caffeine only at breakfast.

I stop drinking caffeine at 5pm and I can fall asleep at 10pm or 11pm. Sometimes it feels like if I don’t drink enough caffeine during the day I can’t fall asleep.

Do you have ADHD? For me caffeine helps calm my mind, and I can fall asleep having had caffeine without any issues.

I'm in the exact same boat as the commenter you're responding to: I'm in my 40s, been a night owl my whole life. I very, very rarely fall asleep before 1am, despite decades of trying. I usually (but not even always) have a cup of coffee when I get up in the morning, but that's it.

Why is it so difficult to imagine that people have different sleep schedules? Like, we do not blink at the thought that, say, height exists on a bell curve. Why wouldn't a circadian rhythm?

God save me from the early-riser moralists.

No morals implied here. I had the same pattern as you until I learned about sleep health from Matt Walker. There are very specific things you can do to change sleep habits, but only if you want to.

Of tremendous importance to me was learning that not all sleep is of the same “quality”, and that quality affects you the next day. You can learn how to improve sleep quality. Matt Walker is a good start in case your interested. Andrew Huberman has some episodes on it, too, as does Rhonda Patrick.

If you’re happy with 1AM then by all means, don’t change. I wasn’t happy with how I felt during waking hours. I was getting enough sleep, but it was low quality.

No. One cup of coffee at around 9:30 AM after I wake up, except on very rare occasions.

That being said, when I used to be on aderall for my ADHD I would often take my second dose of the day right before going to bed, as it would help me calm my brain down and fall asleep.

Caffeine does not affect me or my sleep cycles, it does help me focus though by quieting my mind down, and on the weekends I enjoy drinking a cup of coffee and going back to sleep for 30 - 90 minutes of deep relaxing sleep.

Same. I tried having a bed time routine, eating/drinking at certain times, reading before bed, no phone, etc. Nothing makes a difference. I get sleepy around midnight and wake up around 8 - 9 am.

All I wanted to do growing up was sleep. We were the first ones on the bus at 6:30am every weekday, and then my parents dragged us to some kind of sport extracurricular on Saturday mornings and church on Sunday. I would have been so much easier to deal with if I'd just had a chance to sleep.

If you are anything like me, what you are able to do is driven by what you have to do :)

I used to be a developer/dev manager and in that life, if you booked a 9 or even 9:30 am meeting with me, the odds of me being in by then were low. I loved sleeping in.

Then I moved to the business side and my life was that quite often, I had to be at the airport say 7am. So now there was a REASON to move my life to an earlier schedule and it was doable.

Now we have little kids, who get up super early so there's yet another pull towards an earlier start to the day, and I am able to do it fine.

If there was no pull, I'd probably sleep till 10 but I don't think I'd be happier or more productive.

I used to have to be in the office by 8 AM. That was the absolute worst thing for me ever. I would be groggy and tired till around 11/12 and only then would my brain engage. Even though I was tired all day, I could not fall asleep before midnight or 1 AM.

Trying to shift my sleep schedule for a "REASON" does not work. In fact I used to be late so often that my boss let me have an exception and work slightly shifted hours, this gave him more of my productivity.

I just love how half of the responses to you refuse to accept that chronotype is a physical attribute just as real as height or metabolism. I see a "just push through it" and a "stop drinking caffeine" so far, and those are emblematic of how people without extremely shifted chronotypes absolutely will not try to understand the health and social costs to people living outside of their enforced norm.

This post on the front page was SO timely for us! My son (16) was feeling very sleepy and tired the past week. On Friday he took a brief nap at 5pm, but woke up next morning, after 15 hours.

This morning when I went to wake him up at 6am he just couldn’t make it so I let him stay at home. This never happened before.

Please have him do a sleep study. It turned out that I had undiagnosed narcolepsy for decades. Sleeping 15 hours is exactly what I used to do.

It's a low cost high return kind of thing. If I'd had early diagnosis, I wouldn't have been fired due to getting jobs that really, really wanted my butt in a chair at exactly 9am. (https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1392213804684038150)

That said, the rate of narcolepsy is extremely small, so there's probably nothing to worry about. But hey, it happened to me, so maybe worry a teensy tiny bit.

Add sleep apnea to that. I don't have it myself, but some of my friends had a night-and-day difference in their life as a result of getting their obstructive sleep apnea treated. Significant weight loss, depression gone, no headaches, doing well in life instead of struggling every day.

One of my friends effectively dropped out of university due to sleep apnea. He just wouldn't be able to get up for lectures or engineering labs, or be so out of it he had difficulty absorbing the material. A shame as he was a sharp guy, and has struggled with things in the decade since due to various knock-on reasons.

We used to laugh about how loud he snored echoing through the house - but looking back this was more a symptom of a medical issue than a joke.

It's a failure of modern western society IMHO where we see people actually needing sleep as "lazy", rather than a requirement to actually be their best.

> It's a failure of modern western society IMHO where we see people actually needing sleep as "lazy", rather than a requirement to actually be their best.

another one is that we let the morning people set the rules. If your butt isn't in a chair at 8am cranking out widgets you're "lazy" but the morning people can go home and be in bed at 8pm and they're virtuous and hardworking.

Our society has an implicit bias in favor of the morning people and against the evening people. And I think that amplifies a lot of the "people who need sleep" problems because it's not just needing sleep in general, your sleep patterns had better align to the prevailing social norm too. If you'd rather live 10-7 instead of 8-5... tough shit. And even remote jobs sometimes have meetings/etc that you can't avoid.

One of the interesting ideas about autism is the "night owl" tendency may have been socially desirable in the past... when your life is on the line, it's good to have someone who can reliably be awake all night and focus on small details that might signal danger. But now it's maladaptive since everything runs 8-5 and we are in considerably less danger of being eaten by predators.

(it is unnecessary to medicalize everything, even if it's just that some people prefer to work later, that should be enough. But there seems to be some basis to the connections between autism and sleep problems, something like 80% of asperger's diagnosees have comorbid sleep problems. That seems like the kind of link you really don't see that often or strongly.)

This was me in high school and early college. Sleep apnea, not even overweight (which is pretty rare, especially for a kid). It was a pure miracle that I was functional at all but yeah, slept easily 14 hours a night and looked like a zombie during the day. Principal thought I was depressed.

This describes a lot of what my life was like between the ages of 17 to 20. I would sleep for 12+ hours at a time if I got the chance and would also take constant naps. Got tested for a few things but nothing ever came up. Eventually my sleep patterns returned to normal and these days I get by on 8-9 hours a sleep a night.

In addition to things like sleep apnea, this could be a viral illness (mononucleosis is famous, but there are other "post-viral fatigue" culprits) or even type 1 diabetes (before I was diagnosed, the first sign I noticed was sleeping 16 hours a day). Has your son lost weight recently?

There a lot of possibilities but I'd encourage you to not just write this off as "he's a teenager". He didn't just become a teenager in the last week.

i've had this happen a few times each semester, I go to wake up my 13 year old for school and the look on his face is just pure exhaustion. I just say "dude, go back to sleep" and around noon he gets up and comes wandering into my office. It may be growth spurts or just staying up too late after bedtime but some days i just let him sleep. There's nothing happening at school he can't handle the next day anyway.

As a teenager I used to stay up until 2-3am watching movies on my ipod touch - which had a ludicrously small screen by todays standards.

I'm in favor of moving back start times but we should also better study and educate on the consequences of bad personal habits.

I 100% agree. I'm unfortunately not an expert in the field but over the years I've seen "studies" that are very flawed or impossible to replicate. I'm all for some experiments for those willing... perhaps it would overall increase the amount of sleep students get... but for some I feel it would completely wreck their schedules.

This is anecdotal but when I went to live with my grandparents for a summer, I hated every minute of it. They lived on a farm with no wifi. By the last week or two though, I realized I sorta enjoyed it. I was out like a light by 10 pm every day. I was getting more exercise etc. I had no reliable reason to stay up past 10 pm and my body seemed to adjust to what felt natural.

As an adult, I can say that if school started later, I would have just stayed up later. There was even a time in college that I would stay up till 4-5 am. Sometimes you would know a snow day the night before and I would tell my friends on the west coast that I could stay up even later. It was awful but I couldn't see it at the time. It took me years to fix. I now sleep around 1 AM which I still wish I could sleep earlier but I'll take it.

// should also better study and educate on the consequences of bad personal habits.

Yeah - and you can get away with bad habits until you can't. An ex of mine was very successful through her early 30s despite being out and partying late quite often. Then she joined Goldman Sachs where the bar is higher, and all of a sudden she was like "shit, I gotta go to bed early if I need to keep up."

Is it "bad personal habits" though? If I wasn't staying up to 1-2am reading, I was lying in bed waiting to fall asleep until 1-2am with my eyes closed, bored to tears and completely miserable. So you tell me which I should have been doing.

That's my tendency. I can go to bed at 10pm but what's the point if I can't get to sleep till 1am?

My son's internet goes out at 21:30.

He did once rack up a tremendous phone bill by using his phone at night, but I think he learned not to do that any more.

21:30? Is he 5 years old?! Poor guy.

What are you talking about? No a teenager is not 5. And five year olds don't get their own phone and internet access until 21:30.

Missing the point much?

Just trying to communicate clearly. It helps, when trying to get a point across. Try it.

Seems to me that teenagers in general have a very predictable tendency toward staying up late.

Going to bed in the evening isn't a solution to healthy sleep schedules: it's an accommodation to waking up in the morning.

Why do teenagers need to be waking up early? Since we know that most struggle accommodating an early rise, why not, as a society, accommodate a late rise?

Can't stress enough how important this is. People's circadian rhythms shift with age, and during teenage years, they are the latest (or most "night owl"-like).

Current school times practically guarantee that teenagers will be too tired and sleep-deprived to learn much.

And yet many teenagers do just fine and end up learning a lot. How do they manage? Are they tired? Do they have magical circadian rhythms?

Chronotypes are a spectrum, probably roughly normal distribution. So ~25% are going to be in the left (early) quartile and will be fine.

And of course, even I as a pretty severe nightowl learned some things in school. It was just that I was constantly falling asleep and always sleep deprived and had to catch up on sleep every single weekend. I likely would've done much better had school started 2h later.

Ideal support at home in some cases. Being allowed to rest and sleep as needed, good food around, transportation to help minimize commute times, etc. Having this makes it much easier to meet the demands.

Not in all cases. But there are absolutely logistical advantages some kids have and others don’t, and some kids suffer significantly for that disadvantage.

Always exceptions to rules of course. And humans can still do impressive things under duress. Maybe the question is not how do they manage, but how much better could they manage under more ideal schedules, and how many more kids would do better as well?

Yes, high-achieving teenagers are mostly tired all the time

Maybe just schedule the not-intellectually-heavy stuff earlier in the day, if we can't screw up the parents' schedules with a later start time.

For example, start school with a study hall (that you can miss if you're so able e.g. if you can drive yourself to school), and let the kids nap. Honestly that would have been a game changer for me, as I never did my homework until the last second.

Yeah, a few hours of optional study hall before or after school would be so good. It gives some buffer for the studious kids. Plus, 50% of class time is wasted anyway. Just teach essentials.

Getting on my soap box: most important buildings in an educational institution are the library and the sports hall. Healthy mind in healthy body. Dial in formal instruction tactfully. That's really it.

There are definitely tons of ways to satisfy this issue that we seem to be predisposed against because it would introduce slack in the system, and at multiple layers, the school system is designed to be a "precision engineered watch" - the staff never has time, the parents never have time, the kids never have time, and the measures of success are built around bureaucratic elements and adversarial dynamics. Thus every homework assignment I had came with a pit of anxiety about formal structure: "Am I following the exact format? Or will it come back with a zero because I didn't correctly read the teacher's mind about what's being asked for?"

That kind of thing is resolved if there's slack, but in many schools it isn't there: it's just pushed downwards until it hits the students and they get marked late, absent, failing on their work, and blamed for being irresponsible.

I once had a band teacher in high school that wanted us to do an "optional" practice session after school. I did not show up, and the next day she gave me an earful in front of the class because by optional, she meant you had to attend unless you were excused. I explained that that is not the definition of optional, and she should find a different word for it, but she was uninterested in using correct nomenclature.

I seriously don't understand why schools don't simply swap elementary and high school schedules.

When I grew up, and what seems to still be the common pattern, is that the buses go out first for high schoolers to start school early, then do a second route to pick up the elementary schoolers who start school later.

Can't we just swap those?

Elementary school kids wake up earlier naturally, and this helps the parents who need to get their young kids off in order to get to work. While high schoolers are perfectly capable of waking up and catching the bus on their own, even if their parent left for work two hours ago.

It seems like it's better for parents' logistics. Am I missing something here?

This is what my high school did and it worked great. That extra hour of sleep in the morning as a high-schooler was crucial to me getting 7-8 hours a night.

It's better for students and for parents. You just need to have adequate afterschool programs for grade school kids until their parents get off work.

You're missing two things, one for each age group:

For the younger kids, each hour earlier they start is an hour earlier they finish, which means parents need to either finish work earlier (not possible for most people), or pay for an additional hour of after-school child care (expensive). Having free child care to cover the gap between school finishing and work finishing is extremely rare, and the acceptable age to leave your child unattended after school is going up due to over protective parenting (for example, I was a latchkey kid starting in the 3rd grade, but nowadays that seems almost unheard of until middle school).

For the older kids, starting later means sports / extracurriculars finish later, potentially after dark or after the parents are done working and expect kids to be coming home.

Definitely can see what you mean about the younger kids in the afternoon, thanks -- I'd definitely been missing that in my thinking.

Funny I never thought about it till now -- in my public elementary school back in the day, the (minority of) kids who didn't have a parent at home in the afternoon, stayed an extra 2-3 hours at school for the rest of the afternoon at no charge, mainly doing art activities like finger painting etc, and they even provided snacks. I remember joining a few times just because I wanted to hang out with my friends there. It was very minimally structured/supervised -- just something to do to maintain interest but not be rowdy, not intended to be "educational" or anything.

I've never heard of that kind of thing since though. But it sure makes a lot of sense for that to be provided standard by elementary schools, now that 2 working parents is the norm.

> And around puberty, their circadian clocks shift by a couple of hours, meaning they get tired later at night than before and wake up later in the morning than they used to. This shift reverses at adulthood. The biological nature of this daily rhythm means that sending a teenager to bed earlier won’t necessarily mean they fall asleep earlier.

It's not clear to me that this shift is actually biological in nature, or trained in from years of habit. I still have friends who never got jobs or careers after high school. Now into their 30s they are staying up regularly to 3-4am. If anything, their circadian rhythm has further extended.

If this is the case, "letting teenagers sleep in" might just offset that habit correction into the college years, or the early career years, or etc. Or constitute a permanent change in circadian rhythm for that generation.

Is smartphone/digital screen attributable to some degree to teenager's late-night habits, and therefore a need for later school times?

Research into teenagers' shifted body clocks has been going on since well before smartphones and even laptops, if I recall.

Anecdotally, as sometime who was a teenager in the pre-smartphone era I stayed up late plenty without any personal portable screens. I’d just be staying up to watch TV or read a book instead.

You are correct. I think research started into the effects of TV screens on teenagers sleeping patterns.

Research has indicated that extensive television viewing tends to be associated with sleep problems among children, adolescents, and adults.1-6 However, few studies of risk for sleep problems have assessed television viewing.1 Only 2 studies have investigated the sequencing of the association between television viewing and the development of sleep problems during childhood or early adolescence.2,5 The findings of both studies suggested that television viewing was associated with increased risk for sleep problems during the next 9 to 12 months. However, no prospective longitudinal study has investigated the long-term association of television viewing with the development of sleep problems from early adolescence through early adulthood. Thus, little is known about the nature and direction of the association between television viewing and sleep problems during adolescence and early adulthood.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...

I read about it several times in Discover magazine as an early tween/teen. I had a subscription, haha. So, it was a recurring topic 20+ years ago in a fairly popular magazine.

This was well before kids commonly had phones, and while I owned a palm pilot, it didn’t keep me up at night and it was… atypical at best for kids to have or perhaps even want them, haha.

Around the time I turned 18 most kids my age had cell (not smart) phones and computers had become common in households, but I don’t recall them being a major sleep disturber yet. I would stay up on mine learning to program and playing StarCraft around 20 years ago, but again, I don’t think this was nearly as typical as kids watching tv in their rooms back then, let alone using phones or tablets today.

Anecdotal, but as a pre-smartphone teenager I was a night owl which has gradually vanished despite the introduction of smartphones, so I think there's more at play

Same here. Always a pretty harsh night owl. The arrival of phones didn't change much for me. It is probably a factor for the average student, though. Question is how much vs. the natural circadian rhythm shift.

To some degree, perhaps. But this problem/requirement was around long before smartphones, long before home computers.

I was a pre smart phone teenager. Up into the late late night reading, drawing with pencil and paper, and playing acoustic guitar. Sleep did not accept me early in the night no matter how much I wanted and tried.

Now mornings are the best part of my days. I’m in my later 40s.

I was going to school at 6am and sleeping through class long before everyone had screens in their pockets.

The issue has existed since well before widespread availability of smartphones and cheap laptops.

Here's a clinical review from 2003 (largely citing studies from the late 1990s) where the same issues were already clear:

http://web.mit.edu/writing/2010/July/Wolfson%26Carskadon2003...

One major part of the problem is that teens tend to go to bed at the same time regardless of when school starts the next day. Hence those students in school districts with earlier start times simply get less sleep, resulting in more irregular sleep schedules. In turn, that leads to worse cognitive performance.

I was an avid reader, and my best opportunities to read were late at night. I'd start with a flashlight under the covers, but I found out that the best way to slip by was to go into the bathroom, lie in the dry bathtub with the light on, and read for as long as I wanted. It worked fairly well for a while, I guess. My mom went absolutely nuts over that strategy though. I suppose I was about 10 years old at the time. Later on, when I was 16, I had a so-called "girlfriend" and I would fall asleep during late night phone conversations with her. Or I'd go visit her house and come home late at night.

In high school, I was beginning to feel the onset of a chronic major depression, and I absolutely could not wake up on time. My hair regimen took 60-90 minutes to fix up in the bathroom, and by the time I was driving myself, I found an 11-minute route to rocket to school as fast as possible. Most of the time, it would be my father pouring cold water into my face just to get me roused out of bed. Therefore, mornings became an absolutely traumatic time in addition to all the other childhood traumas I was undergoing, and it took me decades to recover from that.

The problem is if you start later, you'll end school later which means you'll start activities/dinner/homework later and go to bed later and there wont be much difference.

Does the research bear that out?

I've gotta ask: is this really such a big problem in other countries? If not, are they starting school later? How are the successful ones dealing with it if not that way?

The scientific consensus is that children need more sleep than theyre getting, and that waking up later is healthier. I assume this problem is the same in most parts of the world.

Can solve that by going to bed earlier too, but I doubt my teenager self would have listened to that.

Its more than just rebelliousness. Teens' circadian rhythms are naturally shifted towards falling asleep later in the evening and waking up later in the morning.

The cicadian rhytm doesn't actually know what the clock on your wall says, only when you eat and get daylight. A late cicadian rhytm is functionally equivalent with poor sleep hyhiene.

And when other people are active. It seems to be fairly common that night owls need an hour or two of their own time after most other people have gone to sleep, or at least have stopped bothering them.

Why not going to sleep earlier?

in the article: „And around puberty, their circadian clocks shift by a couple of hours, meaning they get tired later at night than before and wake up later in the morning than they used to. This shift reverses at adulthood.“ I agree with you somewhat that there is some personal responsibility required here, but I disagree that the answer here is so simple as going to sleep earlier.

Did the article cite the source for this and maybe I missed it? It says a lot of things and "countless studies" but curiously doesn't list all of them.

user jobs_throwaway posted a link to a paper on this topic

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK222804/#:~:text=Resear...

In the article, they link to this website.

https://www.nationwidechildrens.org/specialties/sleep-disord...

>I agree with you somewhat that there is some personal responsibility required here, but I disagree that the answer here is so simple as going to sleep earlier.

I think this is where I'm at. I know its entirely possible to sleep earlier with lifestyle changes. I spent a summer at my grandparents with no wifi, tech etc and going outside to play, I was so bored but damn if that wasn't the best sleep I ever had in my life, lol... and early too, never more than 10 PM.

I'm just worried if we start later and later, it could keep creeping up until you have no reasonable time left to start later. I suppose experimenting with it couldn't hurt though.

Because teens have a natural tendency to fall asleep later: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK222804/#:~:text=Resear...

Sure, it is possible to have them go to bed earlier, but you're fighting biology

We are already fighting biology the whole time by waking up early. Why can't we fight biology for a week until the body adjusts?

You can just ask Google for the typical high school (noting that the term for such schooling can drift) hours in another country. I chose Spain, and it says 9-5 with a 2 hour break for lunch in the middle. Some of the sources say 8:30. Nothing says earlier than that. This article, in contrast, says it required this argument to even get some schools here to compromise on 8:30, and that 9 was the recommendation.

Spain has an absurd timezone though

Spain is just an hour off compared to the sun, comparing to countries close like UK (same longitude, 1 hr time diff)

All the high schools I know of in the UK start at 9am. Never heard of any starting earlier, though private schools might be different.

My teenage son gets out of bed at 7:50, then bikes to school, which starts at 8:25, I think. I got out of bed a bit earlier when I was a kid because I had to bike 10 km to school which started at 8:25.

Naw: Not all but much of the unwritten but standard rule of all of education from K-Ph.D. is (A) to exercise the standard drive people, the teachers and their bureaucracies, have to control and direct other people, the students, and (B) to make those under the control to knuckle down, put their nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel, burn the midnight oil, be disciplined, prove themselves, be obedient, stimulate the metabolism to be able to work while sleep deprived, ....

One way to see this -- as I did twice in grad school and once in high school -- is to take a filter, flunk out course when already know the material very well and easily and effortlessly make As and lead the class -- the prof can become really angry that he was not able to intimidate the student, lower the student's self-esteem, show the student that they, the prof, know more than the student could hope to know, etc.

In this case, the 3Rs, the STEM fields, the term papers, etc. are not really the preparation for life but merely the packaging while the real preparation is (B).

My high school started at I think 6:45. I would set my alarm for 6:00, but would hit the snooze button a few times until about I think something like 6:20 when I had to absolutely get up. I knew that if I got out of bed at 6:21 or 6:22, I would have to rush to get to school on time. 6:20 was the exact latest time I could wake up without rushing. I had the times down to the minute. Every morning was a struggle to get out of bed. I never got used to it.

Now as an adult, I work from home, so I wake up and go to sleep whenever I want. If I want to wake up at 3PM and go to bed at 5AM, I can do that with no consequence. It's amazing. These days I occasionally have to wake up early, but when I do, I have no problem doing so. I think it's because if I'm waking up early these days, it's because I'm doing something special that I want to do, like traveling. This makes be think think the reason why I had such trouble waking up as a teenager was because I just hated school so much.

When I went to school I had to be there at 7:20 which meant leaving home at 7:00. It sucked but it also meant I had most afternoons free to play with friends. When looking how schools today for various reasons swallow whole days I wonder whether I did not grow up in a golden age.

I hope to pilot a unique sort of homeschooling cooperative with other participating parents. It would be open to those adults who have demonstrated ability to teach a class/subject decently well enough. On Tuesdsays and Thursdays, kids would learn government, on Mondays and Wednesdays, math or foreign language. Parents would teach groups of children of hopefully similar age groups. I'm not sure if this is even possible or likely, but it sounds better than subjecting them to the hell that is public school, with the increase of suicide risk and the recent obsession with exposure to transgenderism among very young children in some school districts, anything seems better than the public school status quo.

We need to start running these schools like a tech company. Institute a performance management system like OKRs, and put students on a PiP if they need it. If students still fail to perform, punish the parents.

Student achievement should be individual but also partly tied to the performance of the school.

Work should be managed via Agile manifesto, with students having stand ups and participating in planning poker. Velocity should be monitored and getting done as many tasks as possible should be encouraged.

Also I think all student work should be done via git.

Just think of the possibilities! We would already have a legion of workers right out of high school! This would put downward pressure on tech salaries, making the workers far less costly!

Maybe schedule and school choice would be better. I even went to earlier classes before the official start of school and did fine. One size does not fit all, and pushing a universal change in start time will hurt some students.

> Teenagers need about nine hours of sleep a night—but they get closer to seven.

Mine isn't doing too badly then, I guess. He usually goes to bed way too late in my opinion, after 10 pm, sometimes 11 pm. But he comes out of bed just before 8, so that still adds up to 9-10 hours of sleep.

8:30 is the normal school start time around here, and he can bike there in about 15 minutes. The article doesn't go into what the starting times of the offending schools are, but if it's before 8, then I would definitely agree that's way too early and irresponsible.

I remember by high school bus always picked me up before 7. I think my first class started a little before 8.

My high school in Virginia started classes at 7:20am. It meant I had to be at the bus stop at 6:50am, and that meant getting up at 6am if I wanted to eat breakfast.

As someone who had a night owl tendency and a distinct interest in computers, I ended up staying up late most nights. I'd get 4 or 5 hours of sleep and it was never enough. In 10th grade I just gave up on school because I saw no value in the torture of getting up that early for classes I learned nothing in anyway.

I've seen this for many years, I think it's even been tries here in Twin Cities MN schools. Bus driver shortage and route consolidation of the last few years probably didn't help, but perhaps the "take the city bus" routine for high school students has changed the behaviors a bit. Getting off the school provided dependency could help shift the timings to what works best and not necessarily need to account for sports students.

Hell, yes! I've been saying this all my life. At one point I was forced to wake at 5.30 because we lived too far from school.

I'm can't say it caused depression, but it surely made me feel like crap every day, almost all day.

And this is not particular to the US. I live in South America and it's the same here. With one benefit - we don't engage in as many extra curricular activities, so that won't be a problem.

We're abusing kids to service a completely unworkable subsidized childcare solution with an incoherent pedagogical model. The future will not forgive us.

A teenager myself, I agree schools should start later. To my surprise, the gym teacher is allowed to make some students wake up at 5 A.M. to run laps. There's also no reason why classes starts so early at my specific school, as sport teams and extracurriculars are basically inexistant. The bureaucracy behind all of this must be such a nightmare in Canada too...

Isn't it that most of the elite high-school students in the bay area will not have the luxury of going to be bed before midnight? 10+ APs, multiple ECs, at least one sports team, perfect GPAs... Even smart kids have to sleep less to achieve more. I personally don't think it's worth it, but it is what it is.

Really amazing that two key bugs in schools work actively hurt the brain’s ability to learn, remember, focus, and make decisions:

1. Long school days mean brains are overworked and so don’t function well 2. Multi month summer breaks actively overwrite what was learned the prior year

When will schooling be built to best optimize brain power?

To your second point, that's just a testament of the failure of schooling.

If anything, the only things kids learn are those that they still know after summer break, or better yet, a couple of years afterwards.

The current model is based on memorizing a whole lot of stuff and then later forgetting it. very little is learned at schools and high-schools. The relationship between invested time and knowledge returned is appalling, but it makes sense once you accept that, like others in the thread have said, school and high school are essentially grown-up childcare.

Summer vacation was awesome though.

I don't mean that flippantly. Especially in grader 8/9/10 when summer jobs weren't as common. There are things you don't learn in school, and time for the sake of time is a precious gift.

What time does school start in the USA? I assumed it would be the same as here but apparently not, never heard of a school formal lesson starting before 8:30 here and 9am start is the norm for all school and always(?) has been.

Separate to that how cynical should we be about these psychology studies? As a science it seems hell bent on demonstrating that it is closer to poetry or religion which means we should start with an extremely sceptical prior before closely examining evidence /especially/ when it is telling us something to which we're sympathetic. Stats is hard, sure. Get it wrong by all means, repeatedly wrong even. There is no excuse for not owning that and correcting it rather than doubling down when that comes out if you're claiming to be a science. None. No excuse for not clearly identifying it every time it happens and publicly noting it. [1] No excuse that every first year, university level psych textbook seems to contain the completely discredited [2] "Stanford Prison Experiment" as though it was anything other than gross scientific fraud. It is still being taught to first year as though it were science. How? Seriously. Is everyone in psychology a fraud? Surely not.

[1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2016/03/05/29195/

[2] https://www.nine.com.au/entertainment/viral/stanford-prison-....

edit: links backing it up for those who haven't yet heard how bad it is or just want it to go away. It won't.

My school bus arrived at the school at 7:05 every morning. We were allowed in the building at 7:15. At 7:28 we were allowed to go to our lockers. Classes began at 7:30. My bus time varied by year, but the earliest pickup time I had was 6:20.

Ok. Deeply surprised by that info. I basically never woke before 7am (and that was too early!)

Less sleep is correlated with more device, tobacco, and drug usage. Weird.

But yes, school shouldn’t start before 9AM.

Schools schedules are at the convenience of teachers and parents.

Their parents have to work though

How about we let everyone sleep?

Adults too please.

Its a common misconception that the goal of Education System is to educate. It's not, and the system will never accept 'improvements' that run contrary to it's purpose.

In actuality education system serves four purposes:

One: make both parents avaliable for the job market. For that it must supervise children during work hours, to make sure they aren't getting in trouble, drugs, or worst of all, into politics and protest

Two - They must habituate little wild chimps into highly unnatural behaviour. Wake up early, commute into arbitrary location, sit in one place for hours on end, stare into paper, whiteboard or screen, perform meaningless tasts tasks that have no meaning to your life. Thats your whole life.

If you don't ease people into this gradually, you run out of psycaotrists.

Three - grade people into quality batches, based off their punctuality and ability to perform meaningless tasks to arbitrary and meaningless quality standards

Four - because the management has gone trhough the same system of educations, the pupils must learn to read through poorly worded vague instructions and understand what their superior actually wants to see, even though they are not capable of expressing it clearly. Poorly worded exam papers serve as good training.

If the above is all true, that would prepare pupils for future jobs --whether self-employed or working a corporate job.

One cannot run (successfully) a corner bakery without being able to handle routine and carry out mundane tasks or without getting up early and doing basic chores as well as being able to interact with others, keep track of your finances, etc. Corp job is much of the same.

You're getting moulded to have the potential to be a productive human being. The alternative is to have people find out what works and not on their own.

Even drugs dealers and macs know the importance of all the above.

Now, sure some people for various reasons cannot conform and revert to more "chimp self" and don't do well in civilization. But even if they became foragers and lived off the land, they'd have to learn routines, have attention to detail, patience and so on.

I dunno man, pre-civilisation and education wasn't exactly much fun either. I'd rather be a part of the system that basically gives us everything from food to iPhones and the Internet than fight against it (while avoiding predators in the wild).

This is not to say that education, especially for boys and young men couldn't be made considerably better.

The older I get the more I'm realizing "pre-history", "pre-civilisation" are very Western European Concepts.

Like when the Conquistadors "civilized" mexico Or when the Portuguese and French "civilized" West Africa.

but iPhone!

Plus when the bombs go off over the Amazon warehouses, who lives? You, who can follow a Hello Fresh recipe reasonably well, or the paleoindian who can flint knap all the tools they need to process their calories?

Early civilisation mostly kicked off around Egypt and China so not all that Western European.

Here we go again. Just because people living in huts in the wilderness are seemingly happy doesnt mean you can rewrite history. No one is arguing colonialism isnt bad or cannibalism et cetera.

Once you really dig deep into history you can see humans have been wiping off other nations and civilizations left and right. Assyrians, babylonians - all gone. One could make an assumption genocide and warfare are almost instinctive to us.

What's left are few rocks standing, if even that, all ruined by our own hubris and violent nature.

You completely missed their point. It was well beyond that they colonized places. It's that they believed they 'civilized' places.

Sometimes I think it’s also naive to think that food and modern conveniences (for you and your descendants) will continue to arrive if you just do your job… today you may have food on the table for your family by just showing up to work. But are you sure that whoever you work for won’t keep upping their share and reduce yours as time passes?

Maybe just maybe “the system” (as you called it) is just a seemingly more civilized way of doing what was done before: surviving.

There's always the question over whether a comfortable unnatural life is better than the sort of hunter-gatherer life our brains and bodies spent most of the human generations adapting for.

No matter, without organized mechanized agriculture and the nitrogen fixation process and other technology of the present, most of us would be dead and not able to ponder the question.

There should be two categorizations for students: highly creative students should be placed on a different path to adulthood, everybody else could use the current system. Highly creative people are more likely to be successful dropouts.

To force highly creative people into this routine, is dictatorship of the mind. That's how it was for me.

Edit: I upset the academics :)

Nice caste system you've got there

That's like, the opposite of a caste system

How would you identify highly creative people? Genuinely asking. If you advantage them, parents will do everything they can to make their kid look like one even if they aren’t one. And some kids will not look like one due to a bad home life or food insecurity or untreated developmental disorder.

You don’t advantage them. A creative track is probably as infuriating to a non-creative person as the current system is to creative ones. Creative tracks should still have outcomes.

It’s like trying to cheat your way into professional sports: if you are not a good fit, it won’t be pretty. And indeed we do have a track for athletes.

To think that all students are identical and they all deserve the same track is myopic. Turns out, we are all different people.

People do cheat their way to professional sports, though. We had a whole collegiate scandal explicitly to get non athletes into the athlete track.

Why not three? One stream for creative types, one for practical types, then the rest. For the practical stream, unless it's changed, we already do this - from year 10 (about 15yo), Australian students can begin an apprenticeship/trade. From that age group, students are choosing electives and focusing on their strengths or interest, whether STEM or arts or physical electives.

And otherwise or for highly creative people, a grounding in most other things is useful. If you're an artist of some sort, you're going to be writing supporting documentation for exhibitions, or running business admin selling your work. To some degree, I think it's healthy for people to be pushed out of their comfort zone here and there.

Do you suppose there should be a test to get into the creatives path? Because every kid will want to be there

Isn't this how we somehow (per|con)verted "likes computers" into STEAM? Everybody deserves to participate!

I would love to see your system/tool for predicting future creativity. Or some evidence that creative people are more likely to be successful dropouts. The evidence I've seen at least suggests the biggest predictor of success is grit: the ability to grind through and stick with something longer than others. Now, you might argue the measure of success also needs to be updated to accommodate your "creative people" hypothesis, but then you're basically designing the question to meet your predefined outcome.

I argue that the school's purpose is to educate. These effects you describe are merely incidental to the process of education. It's not about producing disciplined workers for an industrial era, it just a story we concoct after the fact.

Now, could we reform the system? I supposed we could, but society relied on a set of assumptions on how schools work. If you need to implement reforms, you cannot focus on school systems in isolation.

> Now, could we reform the system? I supposed we could, but society relied on a set of assumptions on how schools work. If you need to implement reforms, you cannot focus on school systems in isolation.

Indeed, but now we are talking about change in two systems.

Like we have 100% proof that starting school later is better for the kids, but many people don't even realise that their taxes are funding childcare, so convincing them to fund additional childcare will be very difficult.

Thinking everything is a conspiracy is giving the assholes too much credit.

The education system is an education system. It's bad because it's underfunded, mismanaged, and pulled in multiple directions for political reasons, not to mention occasionally tasked with impossible jobs, such as keeping a roomful of emotionally disturbed children going in the same direction using only one underpaid teacher and a couple para-professionals. If it were actively designed to be malicious, it would be a lot more competent.

I'm sympathetic to OP, it's not that it's a conspiracy--it's the survival criteria of the system. It has to "work" as an institution to go on existing. Things that make the institution of education more effective tend to happen:

1. It has to be compatible with the modern system of employment (feat the 40hr workweek, generally a commute, workers who typically fit into many companies in standardized roles)

2. Opportunities to make it more efficient that don't run directly contrary to its stated goal of educating tend to happen, e.g. standardized testing. And because students move around and it's inefficient for everybody everywhere to invent their own curriculum, they need to be standardized.

3. It needs to be legible meritocratically, to its own existence and measure performance, and also to usefully input into the employment system.

These are excellent points. Especially the last one, the veneer of meritocracy is an important socialisation tool as much at is a sorting tool

> Thinking everything is a conspiracy is giving the assholes too much credit.

"maxwellhill"? :) https://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/18/business/mcgraw-hill-and-... / https://archive.is/bZKuA

I read it as less conspiracy and more an example of, "The purpose of a system is what it does." Sure, it's a nasty, cynical take, but to some approximation, perhaps it may as well be true.

My dad is a teacher, and each day when dropping my off for high school he used to say "be careful, it is an institution out there."

"They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork.... " -- George Carlin

Do not get life advice from podcasters, standup comics, or anyone who lives in NYC.

(Because they'll all try to get you to do coke.)

Sounds like that Carlin quote hit a nerve.

I generally agree with your criticism of the education system as an instrument of filtering/segregation but I would argue school has some practical value.

> Three - grade people into quality batches, based off their punctuality and ability to perform meaningless tasks to arbitrary and meaningless quality standards

For example, doing math is a useful skill, not a meaningless task.

> Four - because the management has gone though the same system of education, the pupils must learn to read through poorly worded vague instructions and understand what their superior actually wants to see, even though they are not capable of expressing it clearly. Poorly worded exam papers serve as good training

There is a lot of nuance to English communication, at least among native speakers. Things like active/passive voice, hyperbole, and different kinds of logical arguments are implicit to communication in professional circles. It's important to study them.

Also you're ignoring the cultural education that studying literature/writing provides you. There are tons of literary references in everyday communication and you will be at a disadvantage if you don't know them (a "Scarlet Letter", "Big Brother", etc.). These stories are foundational to Western culture and you are expected to know them.

> For example, doing math is a useful skill, not a meaningless task.

I can't define trig relations, I sort of remember how to do multiple unknowns/linear algebra, can't even remember the definition of a quadratic equation and I couldn't do derivations if my life depended on it.

Funny thing is I used to know this stuff and actually used some of it when I was in to game dev. 10 years later anything that's above elementary school I'd probably need to Google or Wolfram.

> There are tons of literary references in everyday communication and you will be at a disadvantage if you don't know them (a "Scarlet Letter", "Big Brother", etc.)

You can look up idioms/references without reading the works.

This is a deeply cynical view and mistakes what makes educating children challenging for the goals of education. Some educators suck. Some educational systems suck. Some engineers suck. Some tech companies suck. But to paint the entire educational system with the same shitty brush is absurd. I know many teachers and many people who work in education who go above and beyond to try to give kids the best experience possible. And despite what the tech universe seems to think, educational approaches change and improve and new ideas come into the mix, sometimes fairly rapidly. If anything, it's the fact that educational systems seem to be habitually underfunded that hinders them more than anything.

Fund free public education. It pays back huge dividends.

And treat teachers with respect.

I find a lot of commentary here to be false dichotomies. Here, education is either bad or good when the reality is that it depends. Some aspects are good, some are bad, some are good in some places, worse in others.

A lot of people struggle with complexity and it is telling that a forum focused on computer science, IT and general tech is so challenged to realise this.

Being good at one thing doesn't make you good at everything. See elon musk.

Whilst I love the cynical view, and it somewhat sadly clicks. I agree high school education sits in the grey. From personal experience the most valuable lesson I leaned in high school is when I was doing something I was interested in getting sleep didn't matter. But learning how to grind through work is a really useful like skill. There's no way to teach hard work. You just got to do it.

Adults ought to be liberated as the starting point. HS is full of violence even if implied

> mistakes what makes educating children challenging for the goals of education.

It would probably be more accurate to call them constraints.

> to paint the entire educational system with the same shitty brush is absurd.

I am not claiming it's shitty - I do believe you actually have to socialise kids, and familiarise with functioning of modern society, many families parents won't be able to do it.

You are grossly mischaracterizing the word "purpose". The purpose is to educate.

Yet the flaws in the system are quite real, and you have called some of them out. But calling out the flaws and claiming they are the intended purpose is quite simply wrong.

BTW, you can change who is in control - school boards are locally elected. Your vote has more power to change schools than almost anything else. If you want improvement, get involved.

The purpose of any system is what it does.

Do you thing the prisons are there to 'correct' inmates? It says department of corrections but it looks more like the department of shove them in a hole.

Some of this is true, and some isn't. It is quite a mishmash. That said it is easy to find places in the world where kids aren't required to go to school, and those places aren't any kind of utopia.

Nice that we can have a conversations here. Where did you learn how to read and write? English is not my main language, guess where I learned it.

I don't know your background, but we learned loads of things in school.

Go talk to some kids in the world that are unable to go to schools, and explain them how lucky they are.

#iam14andthisisdeep

On the more serious note, this crap which is so popular among the people who have zero understanding of what education is gets really tiresome.

I'm not sure how this makes since with "classroom" education far predating the modern era. See English boarding school stories or any number US girl coming-of-age stories. Certainly none of them justify the idea that education's purpose is to support two income families.

With that, I think you'd find that most leaders of politics and industry had some manner of classroom education. Homeschooling is not a common practice among the elite. It may still serve the purpose of "habituating chimps into highly unnatural behavior" but if so, it's behavior that is so commonplace as to be indistinguishable from "natural" behavior.

So I'm not sure how we can ascribe all these negative objectives to the Education System as few better methods have come along and found wide acceptance. There's the Waldorfs and the Montessoris and the variety of homeschool co-ops of course, but they are serve a pretty small percentage of students worldwide.

What a completely absurd and nonsense take. Where does this "purpose" get decided? Some secret cabal that controls the education system? Insane.

There are some flaws in our education system that are likely the result of the fact that it is huge, serves an incredibly diverse set of people, and thus is a very complex and difficult to manage system.

There's no secret back room of evil people controlling the populace via an imperfect education system. What a weird take.

I don't endorse the GPs view in totality, but I don't think its necessary to have some secret cabal deciding things in order to have a discussion about the 'purpose' of complex social systems. taking just the example in the OP, parents need to go to work from 9 to 5 to feed their family, so they need their kids to be in school sooner than that so they can get them out the door, so they go to school board meetings and make sure that the start time stays early. No one shadowy is making this decision, its the result of a consistent failure to address the root causes and orient the system towards its intended purpose as part of a larger social system.

If I start living in my van to renovate my house, but I never call any contractors or work on it myself, how long is it before I just become a guy who lives in a van? In the same sense as the van, sets of institutions that aren't subject to constant maintenance and orientation towards their purpose evolve to fill whatever broken niche exists by way of stochastic individual action.

That's just not what the word purpose means. Take your example:

> If I start living in my van to renovate my house

Keyword here, "to". "To" imbues the purpose. If you then completely fail to actually do the renovation, sure, that's absolutely a problem, but the van's purpose was still to help you renovate the house. You just happened to fail at it. Intent matters, and the comment I replied to implies a whole lot of malicious intent that is more likely just incompetence or unpredictable outcomes. The difference is important in understanding how to address the issue.

Don't forget: separate students into age cohorts so they can't learn from each other. Set the expectation that the oldest cohost will disappear forever after a token yearly celebration.

I agree mostly with your points, but what they describe is the 'schooling system' and not an education system. Its the Prussian model or the industrial age factory model of education.

It's all in the numbers.

1. In 1945, corporations paid 50% of federal taxes; now they pay about 5%.

2. In 1900, 90% of Americans were self employed; now it's about 2%...

It's called consolidation; strengthen governments and corporations, weaken individuals. With taxes, this can be done imperceptibly over time.

"Corporations" don't have interests. Their shareholders do and those are individual people.

Corporate income tax doesn't matter much when the same money's going to go to an individual and can be taxed there.

…by "90% of Americans were self employed in 1900" do you mean they were farm workers?

If 1) is such a priority, why not have a hogwarts style boarding school rather than what we've got already?

An alternate implementation might be a larger condo / apartment where there's a dedicated 'house mom / dad / babysitter' to mind the kids during the day.

In a later stage society with strong / real AI I could see the supervision role entirely as part of the social infrastructure.

+++

Long term we probably need to engineer society for less children and a target of gene propagation at equilibrium / replacement rates.

Pet peeve of mine: some older adults are proud that they get up early. And that’s OK in isolation. The problem though is that older adults rule society moreso than younger adults, and certainly compared to teenagers. So for many older adults it feels natural to go to bed early and to get up early. But then we as a society confuse that with universal “good behavior”/good character, so everyone has to dance to that tune.[1] And we do get up to things so that we aren’t expelled from school or fired from our jobs. But some of us do it at the cost of our health and well-being.

[1] Or maybe the cause of our early starts is completely different. It’s not like I have any proof.

I do think there's actual correlation between getting up earlier and achievement. I don't know many successful people who get up super late. Don't know if that's correlation or causation, just that there's something to getting up early to crush it.

There may or may not be a correlation, but how much of that is a vicious cycle?

The kids who grow up to be high achievers tend to have done well in school, which means at the very least they were able to cope with an early schedule. They then observe the correlation that you note and think to themselves "huh, my parents were right, everyone should wake up early" and proceed to preach it to the next generation, who learns it as if it were some fundamental fact of life and not a consequence of the way we've designed our systems.

It's like the problem with math education: the people who dictate the way that the world works tend to be the ones who did well in the existing systems and can't see anything wrong with them.

There are only a certain amount of hours in a day that you can be actively chasing something. Your energy depletes, places close, sun goes down. So it doesn't matter if you get up at 4AM or at 10AM, what matters is the active hours you give yourself. The 4AM person is probably going to sleep earlier than the 10AM, so it equals out.

The only real catch about this all is the simple fact society is based around the sun, and so if you are someone who wants to get up extremely late (2PM+), you have to work harder to accommodate. But those are very rare outside of health conditions. Even most night owls who say they're not a morning person, tend to wake up before 12PM purely because of how society functions. They can't have meetings when others are asleep!

Although the interesting part is how much this changes in the future, with increasing levels of remote work and automation to compensate.

// So it doesn't matter if you get up at 4AM or at 10AM, what matters is the active hours you give yourself. The 4AM person is probably going to sleep earlier than the 10AM, so it equals out

What I am observing is that it doesn't actually seem to equal out for whatever reason.

You might need to seek out more routine information from successful people. See Mark Cuban, Alexis Ohanian, Rihanna, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. All of them wake up around the ~7-9AM timeframe rather than the super early ones aiming for ~3-5AM. These 7-9 risers tend to go to bed around 10pm-12.

There are some major super early risers of course, like Tim Cook. However he goes to bed much earlier at around ~8PM. So you can see how he's trading ~3 hours in the evening for ~3 hours in the morning (contrasting against Satya Nadella's 7AM-11PM schedule [16hrs equal]).

I'm convinced that that correlation has more to do with most of society functioning on a morning-oriented schedule. Night owls are often chronically sleep deprived and prevented from working during their peak hours. Anecdotally I do know a few people who are successful in the entertainment industry and most of them are serious night owls - I would imagine that they're suited to that kind of schedule the same way morning people are suited to the schedule of school or a corporate environment.

We have ceded far too much power to the morning people.

We change our clocks every year for the night owls.

First mover advantage.

Back in caveman times, somebody had to stay up to tend the fire and keep watch. Unfortunately in the world of houses and locks, the daytime people don’t need us anymore, and since they get up first they set the agenda.

Should have let the leopards eat them.

I feel like you're onto something. Growing up, I was always told "The early bird gets the morning worm." In my opinion, I did not want to be the worm waking up early.

It took me a long time to accept that I wasn't going to grow out of my night owl tendencies (or at least I haven't yet, in my 30s). So much conventional wisdom about health, productivity, and even diet begins with "early to bed, early to rise" type of advice. I've never been happier and healthier, though, than when I gave up trying to force myself into that kind of schedule. I enjoy my most alert and creative hours in the evening and I hate the world in the morning. I have no appetite til the afternoon, so I can't comply with all the advice about no eating after 6pm or after dark or whatever. When I try to get up early to go to the gym my workouts are terrible because my body does not want to be awake or alert at that time. I wish society was more flexible and had more career paths that allowed for a less morning-oriented schedule! There is natural variation in human circadian rhythm and not everyone will grow out of that teenage sleep schedule. Well, I certainly sleep less now, and get up at a time my teenage self would have considered early (9 am), but I cannot properly enjoy my life when forced to go to bed before midnight so I've simply given up trying. We need a night owl movement!!

There are a lot of different chronotypes, but it makes sense to have a predictable set of expectations for society. Imagine a world where your doctor was only open from 10pm-6am, because he was a night owl, and your grocery store was open from 7am-10pm, and so on. It would be fairly complicated to navigate. Given that, the question is whether to expect society to be oriented around day or night. Of the two I think day makes more sense for most activities: you can see better, for one thing.

A doctor’s office can have multiple doctors. A grocery store is staffed on shifts.

We seem to be approaching enough chaos where major entrenched systems changes like this will start to become possible.

There are no lobbying groups on behalf of 9am school start times. You have to break the national teachers unions to get this kind of change, which parents appear the right amount of pissed off to do at this point.

Kids can also go to bed earlier. When they leave the protected confines of public education, the world won't bend to your schedule (maybe with the rise of the 4 day work week being talked about on linkedin every other day). Every teen in my family is up till 2/3am on weekends, playing video games with friends, streaming something. All good, but best not for a school night. I'd be pretty tired too if I stayed up every work night till 2/3am. Perhaps try to read before bed, or go for a walk.

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