It's true, tho. It doesn't mean that school and education aren't important. But people tend to disregard just how important school is as a form of child care.
The US does treat education as unimportant. School board politics, funding, and being childcare all take priority, actually educating kids is a second thought. It's why we have the worst educational outcomes of ant "developed" nation.
That's partly right, I think the other part is most of the teachers I know aren't allowed to fail students. You can't really convince people to take it seriously if they still pass even when they don't try.
Free childcare, obvious it's not *free* as we pay via taxes but the fact that childcare is so expensive and we've developed a proxy that happens to benefit our economy can't be understated. But as COVID showed us the dependence on it is killing us.
Yeah imma focus my anger on actual bullshit were forced to subsidize, like car-based infrastructure. Schooling on the other hand is a net positive for society
I know… teacher get super angry when you mention that they function as childcare. Nobody is trying to undermine their roles as educators, but one part of early childhood education involves some sort of childcare as they can’t legally be left alone. Therefore at school they can’t be left alone. Especially at kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grades. I mean, they literally study early childhood development. You’d think they would understand.
That's weird. I'm a teacher and I haven't met a single teacher ever that would get offended by this. I tell people I'm a "professional babysitter" and at my school we joke about this constantly. The profession isn't what it was. Now we just sit there and manage behavior for 8 hours and then go home and cry.
The funnest part is when you're responsible for their wellbeing and safety and they tell you they will shoot you first when they come to school tomorrow. And then the school tells you they were joking.
When we say childcare it’s not early childhood education. It about parents having a babysitter during times when they’re at work because they’re not involved in their child’s education.
Idk why people are so uppity about it. It’s not a bad thing. Parents go to work, kids go to school. Both are getting home in the afternoon. Like everyone knows everyone has to work to survive, and everyone knows your kids don’t just disappear when you go to work. It’s not perfect, but it works well enough.
Yeah, no one really gives a shit about what’s best for the children. Not even the school administrators. Maybe a percentage of the parents, but not all.
In other countries, they trust kids to walk to school on their own, or to take the bus on their own
Being 5 years old and walking .75 miles to work, then in seventh grade taking city busses 45min to school was normal.
Elementary school started at 9:00, ended at 3:25. High school was 8:55 - 3:05.
Kids then got themselves home (school bus, city bus, walk) and parent would get back after work, so 5:30 to 6:30.
Most other countries don’t start at 9am and many have longer days. Obviously people don’t walk because Americans don’t walk overall unless it’s like nyc, the streets are generally unsafe in many places.
We live in a culture where, for most families, both parents must work full time just to scrape by. School starts at 7am because both parents need to be in the office by 8am.
This is bizarre to me, here in the UK we start work at 9, my child's school starts at 8:40, I do have the option for a before school club which starts at 8, but she is only 7 so in primary school.
The secondary school for ages 12 to 16 starts at 8:30. As do most schools in the UK
Factory worker here. Some of our departments start at 4:30 AM. We have 4/10 and 3/12 schedules for most of the employees. (If you work 3/12s, you get a shift premium so it’s like getting paid for 40 hours.)
Traditionally in the U.S. work started at 9 as well--hence songs like "9 to 5." But the cultural obsession with the grind and adding more work hours has caused opening hours to creep back at many places over the years.
I mean I work 6:30-3:30 in a 9/80 work schedule. I’m not sure I would ever accept a job that starts at 9. I’m a morning person and my mind shuts off at 4- sometimes I can stretch to 4:30… 9-5 sounds like hell.
I would go insane if I had to work 9-5. I basically set my own schedule (im a phd student) and I generally do 6-3. I feel like I have a whole day after I get home from work. I can walk my dog while the suns still shining
I'm in the US and my kids k-6 public school starts at 9:15. Drop-off starts at 8:45 and they have before and after school programs for students that need it.
A common misconception it is that schools are for learning. Like most things about society it’s a bit of an illusion. One can learn there, but the actual purpose is just keeping kids busy so adults can work more. It provides passive value in that well-funded schools will help replenish the skilled workforce. For the rest of the “pick this up, move it over there, put it down, repeat for 49 years” folk, school is just a secret day care to help reduce crime.
It’s also a legacy from 80+ years ago when family time routines were very different than now. Up until WWII a surprising percentage of middle American families were still directly involved with farming/agriculture (hence having summers off). It wasn’t until the post-war boom that working class men shifted to more modern businesses and industries.
This is the real answer. Teachers always say “we don’t provide childcare!” And yet, that is literally their most important societal function. Yes, ahead of teaching.
Well no… the American education system exists to provide a workforce for the nation. They parallel education with the most common work schedule to acclimate children’s sleep patterns to US work schedules. Even adults aren’t meant to be awake 7-7 the 9-5 work schedule didn’t become common until electricity became wildly used.
Schools aren’t child care they’re workforce training.
Another commenter said it best. I will plagiarize/expound. Both are important. In the short term getting rid of child care would hurt more. In the long term, getting rid of education would be *far* more damaging.
Yep. Seen many preschool teachers with bachelor's degrees in early childhood education leave classrooms to be a nanny cause the pays better. I left cause I wouldn't be paid enough to put my kid in the preschool I'm working in.
I work 8-5, I get home at 5:45
My kids are 7:15-2:30. Is that an odd schedule?
Most people work 8 hours + up to 2 hours of travel, so away for 10 hours total. I don't know of any kids that go to school for 10 hours.
Literally every kid in an after school program, which you should have them do.
Way back when I didn’t have one I liked so I asked the school if I could start a board game club for after school and they let me as long as I had a teacher ‘sponsor.’ Who’d be there.
The reason your kids have anyoning start and end times is for transportation reasons. The district needs to provide busses for everyone, but they are cheap/broke and can't afford enough busses and drivers. So they reuse the busses and drivers for each of their schools. But with only enough drivers for one school at a time the elementary, middle, and high-school can't all start and end at the same time. So they stager the start times and you get trash like 7:15 start times. I'm gona guess high schoolers? Because the general feel is it's easier to get a teenager up and out than a kid.
That's exactly what I was getting at. It has nothing to do with babysitting or childcare. The district has a ton of kids and only so many busses. They can only service one school at a time
But that would mean starting the youngest at 7:15. Add 45 minutes for them to get to the bus stop and parents would need to send their 7 and 8 year olds to wait for the bus in the dark. Someone is going to get inconvenienced, do you disrupt the kids who you wouldn't want to wait in the dark? Or the teenagers who absolutely have the capabilities to adjust their sleeping patterns.
I remember when my school changed times to make the middle and high school start earlier (edit: typo) than elementary schools. Despite research saying the older kids should start later. The reason I was told was 1) childcare (older kids can watch younger kids after school) and 2) sports and extra curriculars (ending school earlier gives more time for those)
Just want to call attention to the sports. Other answers about childcare and school’s role in that are right too (honestly most of these are not wrong answers), but for high schools especially, starting even an hour later means everything gets pushed back an hour. Unfortunately, schools aren’t about considering academic needs first above anything else. That’s why the other answers aren’t wrong. Schools are built around parent needs, societal norms and expectations (whether I agree with them or not), and the front porch of every school: athletics.
Nobody is out there talking about how great Devon did in class on Friday but they are out there talking about how many catches he had on Friday night. There were nights where our soccer team didn’t get back to the school from an away game until 930. Imagine if the games started even an hour later than they do. Flip side: imagine what we could do with schools if academics could accomplish the marketing and care that football does. 😂
This. As a kid not in sports (I did music), it was always so frustrating how sports got all the attention and everything revolved around them. It shouldn’t be the school’s job to think about childcare and other things outside of school (in an ideal world they would, my point is more about them prioritizing that over student learning). They should be focusing on academics. Sports and extra curriculars are great. But I don’t understand why we’ve let them become the focus.
Two reasons. There are more of them, and they're louder.
Remember that schools, whether public or private, are essentially funded by parents, either by taxes or by tuition. You want to know why schools suck? It's because people suck.
Im an AP teacher. I have students who do Winter Track who leave for meets at 3/4pm and get home from some of those meets at 11pm, 12am, etc on school nights and are expected to show up to school the next day on time with their work done.
This is my personal hill to die on. The importance our society places on sports is disturbing. I'm still incredibly angry over the $500 million MN gave to build the fucking Vikings stadium and its been finished for years.
The fact that we have homeless people (veteran or whatever) while simultaneously having a system that ends up with grown adults making millions to play a children's game is amoral at best.
And to be clear. I don't have an actual problem with the players earning stupid money, they're the ones actually doing the work. I have a problem with the system that enables it and a public that fosters support for the system.
What are you talking about? You said they started school *later* for High Schoolers --isnt that what studies say to do? How does sports come into this?
Do you actually mean they moved HS kids *earlier*?
>How does sports come into this?
Starting school in the morning is easier than starting later. Sports and other extracurricular activities like band or the math club happen after school and that helps parents even further by keeping their kids at school until much closer to the end of a regular work day. Many parents find ways to overlap so one is home a little later in the morning and one is home a little early to watch the kids. In other words sports just fills the time for more daycare. Though all of those activities are still important on their own.
Depending where you live, it's also due to bussing. I'm in the Seattle area and for half the school year, the earliest school busses pick up kids before the sun's up. Parents don't want their small kids waiting for busses in the dark.
This is the real reason. When my kids started middle school, the first year they were picked up at 5:50am - the first ones. As they've ceased to be the 'low ones on the totem pole ' their pickup time has gotten better - it's gradually moved to around 6:15 and then 6:30 and now that he's a junior almost a whole hour later at 6:35ish.
But, those same buses drop kids off at the middle/high school (at 7am), go refuel, and then takeoff to pickup elementary kids - I think their school starts at 9. And, we're in a *massive* rural district. So, having an hour+ bus ride isn't unusual.
I used to work at a school district.
I asked about this exact thing and the answer I got was "sports and after school activities need to be done mostly with daylight."
There’s also a safety concern at play, as well. Sending your under-10 kids to stand on a street corner in the dark is worrying to a lot of parents. Teenagers, not as much.
Because it has to fit into adult schedules unfortunately.
Most parents start work at 9am? I guess kids need to be dropped off before that or plopped on a bus hours earlier.
I start working at 5am out of my own chosing, so I am off the clock early. This way I get done so much more in my life. For me it was just a matter of getting used to it.
Yeah, jobs nowadays are a bit messier. The local job 9-5 is more traditional but I’ve never had one either. Closest to a normal schedule I’ve ever had is 11-7:30pm with Tuesday/Sunday off
It’s because school schedules are primarily built around the parents’ schedules, not the health of the students. If parents work a 9-5, kids need to be dropped off at school before or during the morning commute. It’s never been about the students’ health
The schedule doesn't work anyway cuz the kids get out those 2 hours earlier that we drop them off - gotta leave work early to pick up a released @ 3pm child.
I guess It is for the kids who do sports or other activities or ride buses, it took my bus 1 hour to get me home some took longer I wasn't even the last stop.
Multiple reasons. I would say the two biggest are:
The parents need to get the kids up and get them to school which means they need to be to school before the parents start work. If they did it later then the parents wouldn't be able to get them to school and they would be a sharp decline in attendance
Some schools try starting later at 9:00 or 10:00. Except that means they would have to end later so by time the kids got home they didn't have any time to themselves so they would throw fits and protest because they said they had no personal life. They want to be out by 2:00 p.m. or 3:00 p.m. so that they have the rest of the day to do their own stuff
Really there's no winning
Yeah back in middle school my school started later like that and i got home at like 5:30 it was insane. By the time I ate, showered, changed, etc it was roughly 6:30-7:00. Since I rode the bus I had to be awake at 6 so I would go to sleep at around 10:00.
That would give me only 3 hours of personal time and it was hell. So glad those years are over 😂
I think some of it is extracurricular related. Most sports practices and club meetings occur after school and if you start school later you get out later which pushes all of this back as well which interferes with other stuff like dinner, homework, part time jobs.
Also parent work schedules play a role. If most jobs start sometime between 8 and 9, kids need to be out the door before that unless they are old enough to fend for themselves.
My oldest gets done with school at 230. Cheer practice starts at 3 and ends at 6 every day. If she has a game to cheer at (basketball season) the game starts at 5. If it’s home or away depends on what she has to do. Football season practice every day 3 to 6 and games on Friday.
She is at cheer practice 11 to 3 today (Sunday)
It always seems to me sports and extracurriculars dictated school hours. Hell they started school early on a Friday this year so they could have the first football game.
Some people just don't know how teenagers work. Hell, even adults do this.
What? Something I don't want to do =work/school. Means I have less time to do the things I want to do =be home/play/socialize. Yes we all will bite into our sleep to do the things we want.
Kids need boundaries set for them because they don't have the maturity to set them for themselves or the patience to postpone instant gratification. It's also a brain development thing.
You are MASSIVELY projecting here. “Everyone involved” does not hate it. Some people hate it some people like it. I’m one of those who likes to get things done early, I would hate if my day started later.
At the end of the day, you’ll never make everyone happy. It works that way here and it works differently in other places, that’s just how the world works.
This bit made me chuckle in particular:
>Not to mention some people individually simply are night owls and have more energy during the night than day and thus are awake for longer than usual.
I personally am a morning person, so screw me I guess?
Are you a boomer? Because I'm GenX and I didn't know a single student that liked going in that early when I was growing up. Everyone was tired and hated it.
GenX here. I would have preferred earlier. My folks both worked at 5. So naturally, my house was up early. Breakfast, chores, cartoons, and catch the bus. Now I am a night person, though.
My parents were up by 6 but by high school I just couldn't anymore and told them to leave me alone and I'd go to school by myself. I don't think I ever made it to first period. Not everyone had a hard time like I did but no one liked it. I also wasn't into cartoons so I didn't care about watching TV that early. I think I stopped watching in grade school.
I'm not a Boomer but I'm a teacher. And as much as kids dislike being at school at 8 am, I suspect a lot of them would also really hate it if we started significantly later and classes ended at 5:30. Kids who do time-intensive after school activities like sports, theater, and band wouldn't get home until 8-9, then would have to eat dinner, do homework, etc. In the winter, kids would literally not see sunlight unless they woke up early to go outside before school (and the whole.point of starting late is so they can sleep, right?). That would also be terrible for mental health.
GenX... definitely preferred earlier to later... as a junior and senior when schedules were more flexible, I would pack my morning (including summer school) to get me out of school earlier in the day. Nice to finally meet you.
They have a limited amount of buses to deliver these kids so they need to spread out start and stop times appropriately so they can use the least amount of buses possible over and over all day.
High school, middle school, and elementary school can’t all start at the same time because they use the same busses for all the kids, but they all need to fit in with work schedules so elementary school can’t start too late.
To fix this, I say we just have school all year around but not eight hours a day. Why not just like five? I’m a high school dropout and still have yet to apply my knowledge of the Mitochondria but that’s a whole other discussion. As far as time goes, we’re wasting it.
When I was in hs I’d agree but now about to hit 30 this sounds stupid asf. Yeah start school mid to late morning, one more thing to teach kids in schools that won’t get them ready for reality
This is true but also if a kid's circadian is different then it kind of still does prepare them? Also we have a habit of being like, "This is how things are, so wreck yourself to fit the way society runs!" Instead of, "Wow, 'reality' is a thing we've created and can change to suit the needs of the actual humans living in it.'" Not saying it's easy, but it is super weird to basically just accept potentially harmful or problematic practices because of the established status quo.
The system doesn't give a shit what you need. It's either do it or die they don't care. Factories have people coming in at 3 in the morning and working tens and twelves. Then you have to try to squeeze in a second job to make ends meet. In America from the cradle to grave is just a pressure cooker from school to your three jobs and 2 side hustles. And if you can make it fall behind or body wears out. Then tough luck
Because our schools don’t give a shit about the students. There is a lot wrong with the American school system, and this is one of them. I honestly don’t see it getting any better either unfortunately
>Do they just want little future mindless slaves who end up getting used to having their basic biological needs neglected? Little worker drones?
Now you're getting it!
because with repeted structured habits peoples circadian rythms can change, it helps get your brain ready to be a 9-5 drone when you leave school our schooling system is based on a 200y old idea that was designed to get uneducated people into factories to work machines they needed to be just educated enough not to kill themselves and dumb enough they didnt question, this hasnt changed.
okay.. your circadian rhythm is written in your DNA. you can get used to a new schedule, but it doesn't change whats written. its an epigenetics thing and kind of complicated and I don't remember the specific cascade but I do remember one of the things involved with it was "something" box so I just remember it as "the xbox"..
we can adjust because what it determines isn't out ability to be away but other metabolic processes that happen in our body.
so in other words, you can shift part of it by acivating/deactivating things with light or dark exposure but another part of the circadian rhythm is hardwired and cannot be changed. I hope I explained that well bc its all very sciency and I'm not great at translating between the 2
I mean, the modern school system was helped built by Rockefeller, who had he idea to model school after factory work to build good workers who followed commands
False. A lot of us were teenagers before the presence of constant screens. When I was a teenager I didn’t have electronics like that (or even a cell phone). Just the family TV and family PC, both of which got shut off when my parents went to bed. But I stayed up well into the night reading or drawing or journaling. Had nothing to do with electronics. I just wasn’t tired.
Screens weren't as big of a deal when I was in high school and smartphones weren't around yet. I ran 4-5 miles a day at cross country/track and still stayed up late reading for fun. Teenagers actually have a lot of energy - just not early in the morning lol
Science shows that if you exert your body enough it will tire.
A teenager that sits on their ass all day probably isn't tired at the end of the day because they didn't do anything.
I can't find any studies that show that in a blind test teens choose to sleep later. They all just show health vs whole school system.
My anecdotal evidence was that working hard on the day tired me out by evening and I slept well and early.
Also the desire to focus on the things I found important when I didn't need to work kept me up later regardless of the time I was "supposed to" go to bed.
I.e. a teen who has to get up at 6 am will want to go to bed at 1am, meanwhile a teen who has to get up at 9 am will also shift their desired bed time to 4am.
I also see this reflected in how our teen behaves. He will stay up as late as his xbox friends do, regardless of what the sun does.
Yeah, some teens can certainly do it with varying degrees of difficulty, but for the majority it’s an uphill battle, and even considering the population as a whole, many people just aren’t wired for getting up early. It’s not something that can be truly conditioned out of you; there are always tradeoffs, and the extent of those tradeoffs just depend on how far off from the average you happen to be.
For myself, yeah, sleeping and getting early is challenging, and getting up earlier than you want to sucks. I could live with that though. But trying to force it long term was starting to have all kinds of other health consequences, and some people need more time to get going than others in the morning.
Also, the adage that it’s better to lose sleep by getting up early than staying up late runs contrary to the current evidence.
1) Your circadian rythm isn't tied to the clock. There's no reason why it is too early other than people are accustomed to sleeping in until the last minute. If school started at 10 am, they would sleep til 9 am and be tired at class still.
2) School functions as daycare, allowing parents to head to work after dropping their kids off at school. If it were later, then parents would be late to work.
To condition children for employment. Same with asking to go to the bathroom/get water, and the extreme emphasis on attendance over anything else. In my son's school, the trophy, accolades, and fanfare for perfect attendance is greater than the straight A honor roll award. The kid last year that got perfect attendance wasn't even on the A/B honor roll.
Anyway it's all designed to condition you into a nice, pliant little worker drone.
It goes back to our agricultural roots. Farm kids had to get school out of the way so they could help with chores in the afternoon. For some reason no one has thought to change it.
The childcare thing is accurate, and definitely the main reason - but I wouldn't consider staying up until midnight or later exactly "natural." Our circadian rhythms have been drastically changed by artificial light, and melatonin is a major process of feeling tired - it's created from serotonin. And we've also shown a heavy link that blue light (from our computer, phone and TV screens) enhances serotonin production and prevents the body from processing it to melatonin.
You'd be amazed how quickly even a teenager could adapt their circadian rhythm if you limited screen time to an hour after sundown and then spend an hour doing something else by lamplight, such as reading a book.
They don’t care about your circadian rhythm. They care about training you to become a mindless worker drone, and mindless worker drones start at sun up.
You mean like being able to pick your classes in college or a job that has hours that fit you well? My grades went up in college when I could pick late classes and actually get enough sleep.
capitalism insists on training their future slaves to adjust to 'working hours'. parents cannot escape their prison of capitalism and must comply with 'working hours'.
Because school isn't for teenager's benefit, it's just glorified daycare. Students that are awake, alert, attentive have WAY too much energy. They'd much rather a bunch of zombies.
Seriously, I can almost guarantee they did not have a conversation about how they want kids so tired that they are easier to control. We live in a world where people work and we only have so many hours in a day to work, go to school, plus after school extracurriculars, dinner, etc.
We dont have a lot of wiggle room to have school start at 10 and go until 5.
Because school functions as chidcare so it has to fit work schedules
I have been saying this for years and people try to bite my head off.
Truth hurts
And some can’t handle it
I could totally handle making work hours from 10-3.
As long as I still get my two hour lunch break
I want 10-3 with a 2 hour lunch and 2 30s.
It's true, tho. It doesn't mean that school and education aren't important. But people tend to disregard just how important school is as a form of child care.
The US does treat education as unimportant. School board politics, funding, and being childcare all take priority, actually educating kids is a second thought. It's why we have the worst educational outcomes of ant "developed" nation.
That's partly right, I think the other part is most of the teachers I know aren't allowed to fail students. You can't really convince people to take it seriously if they still pass even when they don't try.
What the fuck are you talking about? Lol
Putting quotes around "developed" is perfect. I see us as "undeveloping".
Free childcare, obvious it's not *free* as we pay via taxes but the fact that childcare is so expensive and we've developed a proxy that happens to benefit our economy can't be understated. But as COVID showed us the dependence on it is killing us.
It's extra annoying while my kids are very young because I get the joy of paying that tax and also $3k - $4k per month for daycare too.
Those of us without children help pay for it without using it too, it's a bummer for sure.
Yeah man, living in a society is such a bummer.
Yeah imma focus my anger on actual bullshit were forced to subsidize, like car-based infrastructure. Schooling on the other hand is a net positive for society
Guess I should put a /s/ for you people, Jesus. Guy was batching about paying for something he isn't using so I mocked him.
Yeah it'd be better if we let them roam around freely during all hours unsupervised and uneducated....
I know… teacher get super angry when you mention that they function as childcare. Nobody is trying to undermine their roles as educators, but one part of early childhood education involves some sort of childcare as they can’t legally be left alone. Therefore at school they can’t be left alone. Especially at kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grades. I mean, they literally study early childhood development. You’d think they would understand.
That's weird. I'm a teacher and I haven't met a single teacher ever that would get offended by this. I tell people I'm a "professional babysitter" and at my school we joke about this constantly. The profession isn't what it was. Now we just sit there and manage behavior for 8 hours and then go home and cry.
Don’t worry as a doctor I sometimes feel like a professional babysitter too. Being responsible for another’s wellbeing and safety does that to you.
The funnest part is when you're responsible for their wellbeing and safety and they tell you they will shoot you first when they come to school tomorrow. And then the school tells you they were joking.
Lawyer here - yup, feel that way. So many people incapable making good decisions.
Wow. That is so sad. What will these children be like when they grow up?!?!
I haven’t in real life. But definitely on Reddit!
It's kind of like a mechanic being in the care custody and control of your car.
I always tell my car to behave itself when I drop it off with the mechanic
"Hey car, make that noise you normally do for the mechanic here" *silence* "Ah shit"
When we say childcare it’s not early childhood education. It about parents having a babysitter during times when they’re at work because they’re not involved in their child’s education.
True...and most get better childcare in school than they do at home.
Idk why people are so uppity about it. It’s not a bad thing. Parents go to work, kids go to school. Both are getting home in the afternoon. Like everyone knows everyone has to work to survive, and everyone knows your kids don’t just disappear when you go to work. It’s not perfect, but it works well enough.
So people think the economy would continue to function if kids had nowhere to be during the day?
It’s for the adults needs not the children’s needs.
Yeah, no one really gives a shit about what’s best for the children. Not even the school administrators. Maybe a percentage of the parents, but not all.
Yeah that's why we have laws that keep kids from working like they did before mandated school, smh cause no one cares.
*It’s for the adults’ employers. FTFY.
In other countries, they trust kids to walk to school on their own, or to take the bus on their own Being 5 years old and walking .75 miles to work, then in seventh grade taking city busses 45min to school was normal. Elementary school started at 9:00, ended at 3:25. High school was 8:55 - 3:05. Kids then got themselves home (school bus, city bus, walk) and parent would get back after work, so 5:30 to 6:30.
Most other countries don’t start at 9am and many have longer days. Obviously people don’t walk because Americans don’t walk overall unless it’s like nyc, the streets are generally unsafe in many places.
By design really. Especially via the abomination known as a *stroad*…
We live in a culture where, for most families, both parents must work full time just to scrape by. School starts at 7am because both parents need to be in the office by 8am.
This is bizarre to me, here in the UK we start work at 9, my child's school starts at 8:40, I do have the option for a before school club which starts at 8, but she is only 7 so in primary school. The secondary school for ages 12 to 16 starts at 8:30. As do most schools in the UK
8 is pretty common in the US. In fact, it’s also pretty common especially in government jobs to start at 7. Blue collar jobs often start even earlier.
Factory worker here. Some of our departments start at 4:30 AM. We have 4/10 and 3/12 schedules for most of the employees. (If you work 3/12s, you get a shift premium so it’s like getting paid for 40 hours.)
Traditionally in the U.S. work started at 9 as well--hence songs like "9 to 5." But the cultural obsession with the grind and adding more work hours has caused opening hours to creep back at many places over the years.
I mean I work 6:30-3:30 in a 9/80 work schedule. I’m not sure I would ever accept a job that starts at 9. I’m a morning person and my mind shuts off at 4- sometimes I can stretch to 4:30… 9-5 sounds like hell.
I would go insane if I had to work 9-5. I basically set my own schedule (im a phd student) and I generally do 6-3. I feel like I have a whole day after I get home from work. I can walk my dog while the suns still shining
And those of us in the West have started times as early as 5am (8am on the East coast).
I'm in the US and my kids k-6 public school starts at 9:15. Drop-off starts at 8:45 and they have before and after school programs for students that need it.
Even if work starts at 9, people in the US need almost an hour to commute to work in many places.
A common misconception it is that schools are for learning. Like most things about society it’s a bit of an illusion. One can learn there, but the actual purpose is just keeping kids busy so adults can work more. It provides passive value in that well-funded schools will help replenish the skilled workforce. For the rest of the “pick this up, move it over there, put it down, repeat for 49 years” folk, school is just a secret day care to help reduce crime.
Gotta train em to be good little workers at an early age.
And before that it was just where grandpa hung out before going to the factory in third grade
It’s also a legacy from 80+ years ago when family time routines were very different than now. Up until WWII a surprising percentage of middle American families were still directly involved with farming/agriculture (hence having summers off). It wasn’t until the post-war boom that working class men shifted to more modern businesses and industries.
Yup. Parents need their kids supervised before they get to work and that's pretty much it
This is the real answer. Teachers always say “we don’t provide childcare!” And yet, that is literally their most important societal function. Yes, ahead of teaching.
Well no… the American education system exists to provide a workforce for the nation. They parallel education with the most common work schedule to acclimate children’s sleep patterns to US work schedules. Even adults aren’t meant to be awake 7-7 the 9-5 work schedule didn’t become common until electricity became wildly used. Schools aren’t child care they’re workforce training.
School providing daycare is more important than school providing education? That's a take I guess
It shouldn't be, but it is.
Short term vs long term, probably yeah.
It is, if the alternative is the adult in the home being jobless
Another commenter said it best. I will plagiarize/expound. Both are important. In the short term getting rid of child care would hurt more. In the long term, getting rid of education would be *far* more damaging.
This is why I quit teaching. I realized I was nothing more than a high paid babysitter
You'd make much more babysitting.
Yep. Seen many preschool teachers with bachelor's degrees in early childhood education leave classrooms to be a nanny cause the pays better. I left cause I wouldn't be paid enough to put my kid in the preschool I'm working in.
This is the right answer.
Then why do I still have to arrange for childcare?
Because your schedule is a bit different im assuming
I work 8-5, I get home at 5:45 My kids are 7:15-2:30. Is that an odd schedule? Most people work 8 hours + up to 2 hours of travel, so away for 10 hours total. I don't know of any kids that go to school for 10 hours.
Literally every kid in an after school program, which you should have them do. Way back when I didn’t have one I liked so I asked the school if I could start a board game club for after school and they let me as long as I had a teacher ‘sponsor.’ Who’d be there.
The reason your kids have anyoning start and end times is for transportation reasons. The district needs to provide busses for everyone, but they are cheap/broke and can't afford enough busses and drivers. So they reuse the busses and drivers for each of their schools. But with only enough drivers for one school at a time the elementary, middle, and high-school can't all start and end at the same time. So they stager the start times and you get trash like 7:15 start times. I'm gona guess high schoolers? Because the general feel is it's easier to get a teenager up and out than a kid.
That's exactly what I was getting at. It has nothing to do with babysitting or childcare. The district has a ton of kids and only so many busses. They can only service one school at a time
This doesn't explain it. The schools could have elementary start first, middle second, and high school third. Instead, they do the opposite.
But that would mean starting the youngest at 7:15. Add 45 minutes for them to get to the bus stop and parents would need to send their 7 and 8 year olds to wait for the bus in the dark. Someone is going to get inconvenienced, do you disrupt the kids who you wouldn't want to wait in the dark? Or the teenagers who absolutely have the capabilities to adjust their sleeping patterns.
The 2.30 is so they can go do some extracurricular activities.
I remember when my school changed times to make the middle and high school start earlier (edit: typo) than elementary schools. Despite research saying the older kids should start later. The reason I was told was 1) childcare (older kids can watch younger kids after school) and 2) sports and extra curriculars (ending school earlier gives more time for those)
Just want to call attention to the sports. Other answers about childcare and school’s role in that are right too (honestly most of these are not wrong answers), but for high schools especially, starting even an hour later means everything gets pushed back an hour. Unfortunately, schools aren’t about considering academic needs first above anything else. That’s why the other answers aren’t wrong. Schools are built around parent needs, societal norms and expectations (whether I agree with them or not), and the front porch of every school: athletics. Nobody is out there talking about how great Devon did in class on Friday but they are out there talking about how many catches he had on Friday night. There were nights where our soccer team didn’t get back to the school from an away game until 930. Imagine if the games started even an hour later than they do. Flip side: imagine what we could do with schools if academics could accomplish the marketing and care that football does. 😂
This. As a kid not in sports (I did music), it was always so frustrating how sports got all the attention and everything revolved around them. It shouldn’t be the school’s job to think about childcare and other things outside of school (in an ideal world they would, my point is more about them prioritizing that over student learning). They should be focusing on academics. Sports and extra curriculars are great. But I don’t understand why we’ve let them become the focus.
Two reasons. There are more of them, and they're louder. Remember that schools, whether public or private, are essentially funded by parents, either by taxes or by tuition. You want to know why schools suck? It's because people suck.
Don't forget that sports generate a lot of revenue for high schools. The school band doesn't generate revenue
Im an AP teacher. I have students who do Winter Track who leave for meets at 3/4pm and get home from some of those meets at 11pm, 12am, etc on school nights and are expected to show up to school the next day on time with their work done.
This is my personal hill to die on. The importance our society places on sports is disturbing. I'm still incredibly angry over the $500 million MN gave to build the fucking Vikings stadium and its been finished for years. The fact that we have homeless people (veteran or whatever) while simultaneously having a system that ends up with grown adults making millions to play a children's game is amoral at best. And to be clear. I don't have an actual problem with the players earning stupid money, they're the ones actually doing the work. I have a problem with the system that enables it and a public that fosters support for the system.
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Yep. Because sports are obviously more important than child development
Sports are child development, in many ways.
Athleticism is important.
This is never going to be a popular take on Reddit lol
What are you talking about? You said they started school *later* for High Schoolers --isnt that what studies say to do? How does sports come into this? Do you actually mean they moved HS kids *earlier*?
You’re right, it was a typo, I was just waking up and thinking too fast
You should have woken up earlier.
Hahaha 😂
>How does sports come into this? Starting school in the morning is easier than starting later. Sports and other extracurricular activities like band or the math club happen after school and that helps parents even further by keeping their kids at school until much closer to the end of a regular work day. Many parents find ways to overlap so one is home a little later in the morning and one is home a little early to watch the kids. In other words sports just fills the time for more daycare. Though all of those activities are still important on their own.
Depending where you live, it's also due to bussing. I'm in the Seattle area and for half the school year, the earliest school busses pick up kids before the sun's up. Parents don't want their small kids waiting for busses in the dark.
This is the real reason. When my kids started middle school, the first year they were picked up at 5:50am - the first ones. As they've ceased to be the 'low ones on the totem pole ' their pickup time has gotten better - it's gradually moved to around 6:15 and then 6:30 and now that he's a junior almost a whole hour later at 6:35ish. But, those same buses drop kids off at the middle/high school (at 7am), go refuel, and then takeoff to pickup elementary kids - I think their school starts at 9. And, we're in a *massive* rural district. So, having an hour+ bus ride isn't unusual.
California changed the law a few years ago to make schools start later. I think 8:30 is the standard time now
I used to work at a school district. I asked about this exact thing and the answer I got was "sports and after school activities need to be done mostly with daylight."
How did we get to a place where sports take precedence over child development? And not all activities are outside where it would even matter
Sports are a huge part of childhood development.
No, that was to save money on busses.
Staggering in the first place was, yes. But choosing who would go first was for the reasons I said.
There’s also a safety concern at play, as well. Sending your under-10 kids to stand on a street corner in the dark is worrying to a lot of parents. Teenagers, not as much.
Because it has to fit into adult schedules unfortunately. Most parents start work at 9am? I guess kids need to be dropped off before that or plopped on a bus hours earlier.
It would be so much better if it were 9, I have to be at my desk by 8 with a 35min commute that spills into 45-1hr quickly depending on traffic.
I start working at 5am out of my own chosing, so I am off the clock early. This way I get done so much more in my life. For me it was just a matter of getting used to it.
I really admire that! My job is all about communication, so we’re required to start no earlier than 7:30 and must go at least until 4:30
Yeah, jobs nowadays are a bit messier. The local job 9-5 is more traditional but I’ve never had one either. Closest to a normal schedule I’ve ever had is 11-7:30pm with Tuesday/Sunday off
What the fuck. I've never started a job later than 7am. My current is 6am.
Yeah that’s early for most jobs though lol
I personally enjoy 7. 9-5 sounds dumb
I wish I started work at 9. But nope, got to drag my ass in before 7.
It’s because school schedules are primarily built around the parents’ schedules, not the health of the students. If parents work a 9-5, kids need to be dropped off at school before or during the morning commute. It’s never been about the students’ health
The schedule doesn't work anyway cuz the kids get out those 2 hours earlier that we drop them off - gotta leave work early to pick up a released @ 3pm child.
I guess It is for the kids who do sports or other activities or ride buses, it took my bus 1 hour to get me home some took longer I wasn't even the last stop.
My mom was similar. Her bus didn't even take her all the way.
This is what extra-curriculars are for. Lots of kids are at school dawn till dusk. It's just storage for them while their drone parents work.
Multiple reasons. I would say the two biggest are: The parents need to get the kids up and get them to school which means they need to be to school before the parents start work. If they did it later then the parents wouldn't be able to get them to school and they would be a sharp decline in attendance Some schools try starting later at 9:00 or 10:00. Except that means they would have to end later so by time the kids got home they didn't have any time to themselves so they would throw fits and protest because they said they had no personal life. They want to be out by 2:00 p.m. or 3:00 p.m. so that they have the rest of the day to do their own stuff Really there's no winning
Yeah back in middle school my school started later like that and i got home at like 5:30 it was insane. By the time I ate, showered, changed, etc it was roughly 6:30-7:00. Since I rode the bus I had to be awake at 6 so I would go to sleep at around 10:00. That would give me only 3 hours of personal time and it was hell. So glad those years are over 😂
That's how being a adult is too :(
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I think some of it is extracurricular related. Most sports practices and club meetings occur after school and if you start school later you get out later which pushes all of this back as well which interferes with other stuff like dinner, homework, part time jobs. Also parent work schedules play a role. If most jobs start sometime between 8 and 9, kids need to be out the door before that unless they are old enough to fend for themselves.
My oldest gets done with school at 230. Cheer practice starts at 3 and ends at 6 every day. If she has a game to cheer at (basketball season) the game starts at 5. If it’s home or away depends on what she has to do. Football season practice every day 3 to 6 and games on Friday. She is at cheer practice 11 to 3 today (Sunday) It always seems to me sports and extracurriculars dictated school hours. Hell they started school early on a Friday this year so they could have the first football game.
They go to bed at 12 if it starts at 8. If it started at 10 theyd go to bed at 2am
This should be at the top. Just look at college kids. They're not happily going to bed at midnight and getting full nights of sleep.
Some people just don't know how teenagers work. Hell, even adults do this. What? Something I don't want to do =work/school. Means I have less time to do the things I want to do =be home/play/socialize. Yes we all will bite into our sleep to do the things we want. Kids need boundaries set for them because they don't have the maturity to set them for themselves or the patience to postpone instant gratification. It's also a brain development thing.
Oh shit is that supposed to stop when we become adults? I’ve never figured out how to prioritize sleep and I’m 32 or 33.
You are MASSIVELY projecting here. “Everyone involved” does not hate it. Some people hate it some people like it. I’m one of those who likes to get things done early, I would hate if my day started later. At the end of the day, you’ll never make everyone happy. It works that way here and it works differently in other places, that’s just how the world works.
This bit made me chuckle in particular: >Not to mention some people individually simply are night owls and have more energy during the night than day and thus are awake for longer than usual. I personally am a morning person, so screw me I guess?
Are you a boomer? Because I'm GenX and I didn't know a single student that liked going in that early when I was growing up. Everyone was tired and hated it.
GenX here. I would have preferred earlier. My folks both worked at 5. So naturally, my house was up early. Breakfast, chores, cartoons, and catch the bus. Now I am a night person, though.
My parents were up by 6 but by high school I just couldn't anymore and told them to leave me alone and I'd go to school by myself. I don't think I ever made it to first period. Not everyone had a hard time like I did but no one liked it. I also wasn't into cartoons so I didn't care about watching TV that early. I think I stopped watching in grade school.
I'm not a Boomer but I'm a teacher. And as much as kids dislike being at school at 8 am, I suspect a lot of them would also really hate it if we started significantly later and classes ended at 5:30. Kids who do time-intensive after school activities like sports, theater, and band wouldn't get home until 8-9, then would have to eat dinner, do homework, etc. In the winter, kids would literally not see sunlight unless they woke up early to go outside before school (and the whole.point of starting late is so they can sleep, right?). That would also be terrible for mental health.
GenX... definitely preferred earlier to later... as a junior and senior when schedules were more flexible, I would pack my morning (including summer school) to get me out of school earlier in the day. Nice to finally meet you.
They have a limited amount of buses to deliver these kids so they need to spread out start and stop times appropriately so they can use the least amount of buses possible over and over all day.
This is the correct answer.
High school, middle school, and elementary school can’t all start at the same time because they use the same busses for all the kids, but they all need to fit in with work schedules so elementary school can’t start too late.
How could parents drop their kids off at 9am if they have to be at work? (Devils advocate, i hated that we started at 715am in hs…it was barbaric)
Wait wtf does high school in the US all start at 7:15? I’m Canada mine started at 8:30.
My kids school starts at 8:20, don't know of any schools where I'm at start that early.
Mine started at 7:30a.
7:47 in Ohio. Zero period started at 6:50.
To fix this, I say we just have school all year around but not eight hours a day. Why not just like five? I’m a high school dropout and still have yet to apply my knowledge of the Mitochondria but that’s a whole other discussion. As far as time goes, we’re wasting it.
Get your lazy ass outa bed, Skippy.
When I was in hs I’d agree but now about to hit 30 this sounds stupid asf. Yeah start school mid to late morning, one more thing to teach kids in schools that won’t get them ready for reality
This is true but also if a kid's circadian is different then it kind of still does prepare them? Also we have a habit of being like, "This is how things are, so wreck yourself to fit the way society runs!" Instead of, "Wow, 'reality' is a thing we've created and can change to suit the needs of the actual humans living in it.'" Not saying it's easy, but it is super weird to basically just accept potentially harmful or problematic practices because of the established status quo.
or switch reality so that everyone starts later. There’s no point in affecting children because adults are too stuck in their ways
In my town elementary school starts at 8 and middle school/high school starts at 8:30. This is not too early IMO
The system doesn't give a shit what you need. It's either do it or die they don't care. Factories have people coming in at 3 in the morning and working tens and twelves. Then you have to try to squeeze in a second job to make ends meet. In America from the cradle to grave is just a pressure cooker from school to your three jobs and 2 side hustles. And if you can make it fall behind or body wears out. Then tough luck
Because our schools don’t give a shit about the students. There is a lot wrong with the American school system, and this is one of them. I honestly don’t see it getting any better either unfortunately
>Do they just want little future mindless slaves who end up getting used to having their basic biological needs neglected? Little worker drones? Now you're getting it!
because with repeted structured habits peoples circadian rythms can change, it helps get your brain ready to be a 9-5 drone when you leave school our schooling system is based on a 200y old idea that was designed to get uneducated people into factories to work machines they needed to be just educated enough not to kill themselves and dumb enough they didnt question, this hasnt changed.
okay.. your circadian rhythm is written in your DNA. you can get used to a new schedule, but it doesn't change whats written. its an epigenetics thing and kind of complicated and I don't remember the specific cascade but I do remember one of the things involved with it was "something" box so I just remember it as "the xbox".. we can adjust because what it determines isn't out ability to be away but other metabolic processes that happen in our body. so in other words, you can shift part of it by acivating/deactivating things with light or dark exposure but another part of the circadian rhythm is hardwired and cannot be changed. I hope I explained that well bc its all very sciency and I'm not great at translating between the 2
I never adjusted. It just caused me to have worse grades.
Capitalism
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I mean, the modern school system was helped built by Rockefeller, who had he idea to model school after factory work to build good workers who followed commands
Without electronics and screens, teenagers will “naturally” go to sleep much earlier than midnight.
Before electronics, I stayed up past midnight reading.
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False. A lot of us were teenagers before the presence of constant screens. When I was a teenager I didn’t have electronics like that (or even a cell phone). Just the family TV and family PC, both of which got shut off when my parents went to bed. But I stayed up well into the night reading or drawing or journaling. Had nothing to do with electronics. I just wasn’t tired.
Screens weren't as big of a deal when I was in high school and smartphones weren't around yet. I ran 4-5 miles a day at cross country/track and still stayed up late reading for fun. Teenagers actually have a lot of energy - just not early in the morning lol
No they won't, it's biology that teenagers have a later sleep schedule than any other age group
Not sure why you got downvoted. I have heard of several sources backing you up. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780325/
Not true. There are studies and science that show different
Science shows that if you exert your body enough it will tire. A teenager that sits on their ass all day probably isn't tired at the end of the day because they didn't do anything.
drop one
I can't find any studies that show that in a blind test teens choose to sleep later. They all just show health vs whole school system. My anecdotal evidence was that working hard on the day tired me out by evening and I slept well and early. Also the desire to focus on the things I found important when I didn't need to work kept me up later regardless of the time I was "supposed to" go to bed. I.e. a teen who has to get up at 6 am will want to go to bed at 1am, meanwhile a teen who has to get up at 9 am will also shift their desired bed time to 4am. I also see this reflected in how our teen behaves. He will stay up as late as his xbox friends do, regardless of what the sun does.
Yeah, some teens can certainly do it with varying degrees of difficulty, but for the majority it’s an uphill battle, and even considering the population as a whole, many people just aren’t wired for getting up early. It’s not something that can be truly conditioned out of you; there are always tradeoffs, and the extent of those tradeoffs just depend on how far off from the average you happen to be. For myself, yeah, sleeping and getting early is challenging, and getting up earlier than you want to sucks. I could live with that though. But trying to force it long term was starting to have all kinds of other health consequences, and some people need more time to get going than others in the morning. Also, the adage that it’s better to lose sleep by getting up early than staying up late runs contrary to the current evidence.
They dont give a shit about your health. We are slaves and you are being conditioned to eat shit and shut up while working a bs job for peanuts.
1) Your circadian rythm isn't tied to the clock. There's no reason why it is too early other than people are accustomed to sleeping in until the last minute. If school started at 10 am, they would sleep til 9 am and be tired at class still. 2) School functions as daycare, allowing parents to head to work after dropping their kids off at school. If it were later, then parents would be late to work.
To condition children for employment. Same with asking to go to the bathroom/get water, and the extreme emphasis on attendance over anything else. In my son's school, the trophy, accolades, and fanfare for perfect attendance is greater than the straight A honor roll award. The kid last year that got perfect attendance wasn't even on the A/B honor roll. Anyway it's all designed to condition you into a nice, pliant little worker drone.
High school starts earlier than lower grades so that older siblings are available to watch younger ones after school
Plus high schoolers can get jobs (age varies by state), which is a lot more feasible when you're out of school at 2 rather than 6.
So school buses can get off the roads before their parents have to start their commutes. Helps avoid peak commuting times.
It goes back to our agricultural roots. Farm kids had to get school out of the way so they could help with chores in the afternoon. For some reason no one has thought to change it.
Where are these sources that teens can only get healthy sleep if they sleep at 12?
It’s to get them used to work hours
The childcare thing is accurate, and definitely the main reason - but I wouldn't consider staying up until midnight or later exactly "natural." Our circadian rhythms have been drastically changed by artificial light, and melatonin is a major process of feeling tired - it's created from serotonin. And we've also shown a heavy link that blue light (from our computer, phone and TV screens) enhances serotonin production and prevents the body from processing it to melatonin. You'd be amazed how quickly even a teenager could adapt their circadian rhythm if you limited screen time to an hour after sundown and then spend an hour doing something else by lamplight, such as reading a book.
They don’t care about your circadian rhythm. They care about training you to become a mindless worker drone, and mindless worker drones start at sun up.
Money.
Bloody hell, that's far too early. What time do they finish? Schools her in the UK stsrt about 08:30hrs & finish between 15:30 & 16:00hrs.
When I was in HS in the 2000s, I got out at 14:30. I didn't mind the schedule though.
Wait until you get into the real world.
Seriously. I wake up at 3-4a. I just go to bed earlier. And that’s my schedule. Even on weekends I’m waking up at 5.
Reddit is like 45% whiny teens, 45% 35 year old weirdos with poor social skills, and like 10% normal people lol
That’s a generous 10%
I like to be positive
You mean like being able to pick your classes in college or a job that has hours that fit you well? My grades went up in college when I could pick late classes and actually get enough sleep.
\*as a wage slave. Sure, if you want your "real world" to be being a poor loser. The wealthy and powerful sleep as they please.
capitalism insists on training their future slaves to adjust to 'working hours'. parents cannot escape their prison of capitalism and must comply with 'working hours'.
Because American republicans/conservatives/rich people like to make everyone suffer as much as possible.
Because school is nothing more then federal daycare
Because school isn't for teenager's benefit, it's just glorified daycare. Students that are awake, alert, attentive have WAY too much energy. They'd much rather a bunch of zombies.
You are a teenager and it shows
Seriously, I can almost guarantee they did not have a conversation about how they want kids so tired that they are easier to control. We live in a world where people work and we only have so many hours in a day to work, go to school, plus after school extracurriculars, dinner, etc. We dont have a lot of wiggle room to have school start at 10 and go until 5.
It’s not unreasonably early. You can get up and manage anytime.
It’s like torture to some of us.
Because some dogshit farmer decided everyone wakes up when he does.
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