Lengthen the school _year_ sure, but I'm skeptical that lengthening the school _day_ won't have, at best, mixed effects, especially given all the studies on sleep etc.
ADDED: I often think I couldn't handle high school today.
I'd quit a job as soon as I could find another, if it demanded of me what high school did. Hell, I'd quit based on the consistent 10+ hour days and constant due-tomorrow deadlines, let alone the rest of it like the before-the-sun's-up start time, having to ask permission to go take a piss, sitting in crappy chairs in bad lighting for back-to-back ~hour blocks all day, and having to keep "working" indefinitely with people who won't stop being shitheads in ways that'd get them fired from most any job inside a week. It's insanely terrible.
Like, there are multiple bad things about it that I've never had to tolerate in such abundance and variety even in low-skilled jobs I've held. WTF.
College and adult life are so much more chill than high school. It was a real shock, leaving there for the wider world. So glad the people who were like "this [shitty thing] is to prepare you for the real world, which is way harder and less forgiving!" or "enjoy it, because this is the best time of your life" were entirely wrong. I'd probably have offed myself by now, if they'd been right. Four years was barely tolerable—a lifetime of that, or worse? No, thanks.
Everything else is much worse for how I think. I don't get to choose how to time my schedule, the curriculum is mostly fixed (you would always have math/english/history, some language for 3/4 years. You only choose an elective and maybe 1 year of science) and homework tended to stack up constantly because every class was 1 hour M-F. And yea, as you mentioned it's absurd having 1 day due homework spring up when you may or may not be preparing for some other project, or test, or even competition.
You also were much more pressured against taking time to yourself. You can skip a class or take a sick day in "the real world" if you need a break or emergencies come up. those "perfect attendence" rewards were the worst grift of the education system.
In the US, it's common for schools to start at 8:00 or even 7:30. Recently there has been a push to start later to give kids more time to sleep. So pushing it back to say 8:30 or 9:00 (but not shortening the day, so basically everything just gets pushed back, and the kids stay up later, and need more time to sleep...).
The reason is purely practical- start times need to be staggered to allow schools to share buses, and having high school students get home first means they can look after their younger siblings until their parents get home from work.
Elementary school, 8am - 2pm
Middle school, 9am - 3 something (3:20pm, I think?)
High school, 7:40am - 2:55pm
It’s completely ridiculous, especially considering how sane many (most?) countries in the rest of the world have it.
Granted, even if they were on 2 income households in the 70's, it was also a time where 10YO's were trusted to get home or even walk home unattended, so it'd only be an issue for the youngest primary students. That may still be the case in some Asian countries today, but certainly not in the US.
For secondary school you can elect to have early and late classes or simply opt out of a period if you have the curriculum met. but I've never heard of a student starting later than 9.
>Who takes care of the kids after parents go to work and before school starts?
that's generally why primary students start earlier than secondary students. By high school it's no big deal if the student is by themselves getting ready to leave at 8:30 if the parents need to take off at 8.
Kids just work at thier own pace and don't graduate until they complete all work successfully.
Anything else is just a diploma mill.
I could have graduated by 12 if they just let me go at the material, instead they had me drop out, in frustration at being forced to work at the pace of the stupidest and laziest, before returning to do exactly what I describe through an alternative education program which cost the system 5x as much per student as main track... and that without addressing that it would likely be cheaper due to fundamentally fewer teachers required per student as the teacher wouldn't be babysitting study hall like they are now but instead focused exclusively on the acts of teaching and grading.
I do agree that we should encourage students to self pace themselves. Another aspect of school I had to de-program myself on: it's OKAY to repeat courses you are struggling on. Expensive, yes, but sometimes coming in a 2nd time gives you the perspective to start focus on the subtleties while you were struggling with the high level details the first time.
In actuality it's more likely that socialization would improve as kids weren't forced through stress periods where they were not permitted to socialize, grouped arbitrarily and explicitly set against each other in various programs (eg - sports, group assignments, etc)....
And that's without yet raising the fact that the kid who does well in language but not math would end up friends with the kid who does well in math but not language, helping each other and challenging each other to succeed in a positive fashion, rather than ending up pitted against each other by the fundamental structure of the class structure.
Nothing tangible. But your peers you do work with very much influences the kinds of peers that become your friends.
But that's tangential to the real point I was making: socializing around a bunch of different peers your age in a specific nigh mandatory environment helps develop a sense of public etiquette. How to socialize, how to figure out who you do/don't want to hang out with, how to manage arguments or de-escalate tension. Potentially delaying or skipping that can be catastrophic, and you can argue that there's so many people today that feel like they never got that.
This can theoretically be replicated outside of school. But given how few venues of loitering there are these days for adults, I don't have much faith that we'll create such places for minors.
>the kid who does well in language but not math would end up friends with the kid who does well in math but not language, helping each other and challenging each other to succeed in a positive fashion, rather than ending up pitted against each other by the fundamental structure of the class structure.
It's all theoretical. But my experience makes me much less optimistic of that outcome than you.
It frankly couldn't do worse than what we have, as the current structure ensures suffering and pain for the majority as a result of the social structure established by the norms and systems.
At least under my suggestion those who would excel Could excel and get the hell out before they were irreparably harmed and held back by the fools and willfully stupid as we have now, let alone the fact that the "less capable" would have a real chance at leaving with a modest education rather than being shoved through and ending up in The real world either zero capacity for real thought, understanding and employability.
It's an inevitable result of reasoning. I can't know what I don't know. Short of the laws of physics, we can never truly predict the behaviors of a new universal model from scratch.
Regardless, I don't think human nature would change that drastically as a result of students being able to pace their learning. Greed, selfishness, and general malice may be lessened but not eradicated. Social castes would probably still exist as a remnant of various luck and circumstance of the elite established centuries ago.
>It frankly couldn't do worse than what we have
I never really disagreed, I just simply want to point out a less talked about point in the current educational system. It's not simply an institution of acedemia, nor a "glorified day care center" as others cynically put it. There's soft skills you don't really get except by engaging with other people, some you don't like. Some you may even outright hate.
I feel any alternative system that doesn't keep those soft skills in mind may face further issues down the road, even if it may or may not end up better than the current timeline.
Kindergarten is about the only part of the current system which could be use as a reference for behavior, as after that all the structural features which _explicitly _ _induce_ the behaviors you reference are Forced on the kids.
So, using K as a reference, what xan we learn about free form education?