Do you really mean there are no breaks in between? Or you mean there's only 10 minutes to get to the next room? It cannot be 0 because people can't teleport and I assume not everything is in the same classroom.
http://www.rockfordschools.org/high-schools/rockford-high/da...
The breaks in my district are 6 minutes long, with five 71-minute class periods. You can't socialize much in 6 minutes, you have to get from one class to the next, which might be a 400m walk if you want to stop at your locker - walking through a dense crowd of people, with a 15 lbs backpack. Or 200m if you bring a backpack of 40+ lbs of books and binders for all your morning or afternoon classes, stopping by your locker just at lunch. Lunch is 24 minutes long somewhere before/in the middle of/after 4th period. "Zero hour" at the top of the linked schedule is if you want to take an extra class, eg. to accomodate state requirements like civics and communications while also taking year-long AP classes, performing arts classes, or doubling up on science/math electives beyond the minimum.
If you have an average morning bus arrival at 6:50, and add a sport that goes until 5:30PM, and are quick enough to have get your homework done in just an hour each night, it ends up being about the equivalent of a 60-hour work week...pretty rough on a 14-year-old child. But we're a Blue Ribbon Exemplary School! Top 250 in the nation! In spite of the flaws obvious in the schedule above, if my family is going to be in an American school system, and especially if we want them near extended family, friends, and my job, we're not going to do too much better than this: I bought a house in this district so my kid could get the same great education I did.
But I guess it would appear in the school records if they didn't go to school. At least in Hungary the state takes away certain benefits if the kid regularly doesn't go to school and it can also have other consequences as well, like having to repeat the year.
But to some degree it should also be part of growing up. When we were 15-16 and all of us commuted by public transportation, a few times we skipped the first class and went to a pub instead. And I didn't become some lowlife gangster, I completed a CS degree with good results.
Parental attitudes changed more than anything else. Coddle kids longer, trust them less. That seems to be the current trend.
And no, there's no bussing for zero hour. You have to drive yourself to school, ride with a parent, or find a carpool setup for either of those.
Do you (parents in general) think this is normal and good for a child? I had thought homeschooling was lunatic, but if this is the alternative, I can see why people would choose it.
In Hungary in high school we had 45 min classes and 15 min breaks for the first 3 breaks, and then 10 min breaks. We had usually 7 classes per day, so school went from 8:00 to 14:30, usually. Then lunch if you want.
In primary school we had a break where it was mandatory to go down to the schoolyard to be outside in the fresh air (but then do whatever you want).
'Gifted' students and those on the honor roll are often given a reprieve from this vicious cycle. But the majority are subjected to it.
I mean, there are tens of millions of schoolchildren in the US, and they seem to be "fine". Therefore it cannot be THAT bad.
But I do remember from American "highschool movies" (OK not that good of a source) that the students were always on the way to a class, just grabbing things from the lockers, but almost never just chilling, sitting around or similar (except while watching some school sport game).
But how do you even concentrate without taking breaks? That's not even good for standardized test scores. Your brain will just not take up any more info if you don't take breaks.
In general the school schedules are arranged for the benefit of the faculty more than the kids, though. The days start too early for most teens, and there's a lot of rushing between overly-short classes, to the point where I recall witnessing some students being marked persistently late simply because one teacher ends the class late and the other starts early. The upside of that is that you do tend to have a break because every single class has a few minutes of administrative work before it can really start.
We also biked to school ourselves unattended. And we had maybe two half-days a year spent on standardized tests, one test each. The insanity of American schools is a more recent phenomenon.
It can vary between school districts though. Generally the wealthier and whiter the neighborhood/city/school, the better the kids will be treated. Although it's pretty shitty even at most of the "good" ones.
What you are reading isn't much of an exagerration though. It is a good reminder of how insane it sounds to you, because IT IS INSANE.
And you say we seem to be "fine" in the US? Have you even been paying attention to what's going on in the US? I don't know how much of it can be blamed on the eductional system... but you know, probably a chunk of it. The schoolchildren and former schoolchildren of the US are decidedly not "fine" though. This place is fucked up.
In Hungary we only have standardized tests for school admissions, both high school an university. (so you write one test and can apply to many places with the score). Otherwise every two years there's the PISA international test, but that's only for statistics, it isn't graded. All our other tests are just prepared by the teacher. Of course this means different schools have different standards, mostly depending on the percentage of Roma students. Where they are the majority there is not much learning happening and then non Roma families rather make their kids take a 1-2 hour bus ride to the next town.
But it's not generally the parents that are pushing them. Except maybe to the extent that parents want to know "How do I know if a school is good or terrible?" and someone can give them a "score" built in part on standardized tests...
I think (and this may not be a popular theory), it is in large part a disfunctional reaction to the extreme social inequality in the U.S.. Going back to the days of legal segregation, some people had _terrible_ schools others had good schools. Even once we have legal equality, somehow some schools are still pretty terrible. If only we had an 'objective' way to determine which schools are effectively teaching, and reward those doing well and punish those doing poorly...
In fact, though, it's still the poor and not white who bear the brunt of all this terribleness. I know someone who is a teacher who was at a meeting where the principal was explaining why it was "only fair" to the poor students to have every minute of the day regimented and disciplined, because they too deserved the best education... while knowing the principal sent her OWN kids to a "sudbury school"!
Elementary school gets recess, don't remember how long. Middle school I don't remember very well; high school you just get lunch (but are perhaps not restricted to one room to have it, at least).