… merely delaying the school start time by 1 hour …
[…]
The truth is, education isn’t about learning new things. It’s about separating students based on how conformist and intelligent they are.
Does it really strike you as plausible, that the reason why school start time isn’t delayed an hour, is that education is about ranking students by conformism/intelligence?
If we grant the premise (and I do, more or less), still it seems like such ranking could as easily be accomplished an hour later as earlier; more easily, even, since you wouldn’t be artificially depressing the performance of the students—which you obviously don’t want to do if you’re trying to measure said performance! And if, indeed, a later start time reduces teen mortality and crime, while at worst having no detrimental effect on ability to accomplish the main goal (ranking students), then pushing the school day forward an hour seems like a no-brainer. We should see parents, public officials, etc., advocating for it; we should see politicians adopting it as a campaign platform; and we should have, by now, seen it widely implemented.
Yet, with minor and insignificant exceptions, we don’t see this. Why not?
Because if you pushed the school day forward an hour, then, on average, many fewer parents would be able to take the kids to school on their own way to work.
Because while ranking kids by intelligence/conformism/whatever is one major function of public schools, another, and also very important, function is simply the fact of keeping kids attended, confined, and “out of trouble”, while their parents are at work.
(See also “after-school programs”. You cannot feasibly extend the school day past ~3 PM—the students will stop paying attention, teachers’ unions will revolt, etc.—but you’ve got to have some plausible reason to keep [at least some of] the kids in the building until their parents get off work and can come pick them up.)
One of the models how such weeding might happen is that you want some precentage of the students to fail. If you apply pressure the breaking point is reached faster. Making a change that helps everybody makes it so that you have to compare higher performance levels which is often harder than comparing low performance levels.
Does it really strike you as plausible, that the reason why school start time isn’t delayed an hour, is that education is about ranking students by conformism/intelligence?
If we grant the premise (and I do, more or less), still it seems like such ranking could as easily be accomplished an hour later as earlier; more easily, even, since you wouldn’t be artificially depressing the performance of the students—which you obviously don’t want to do if you’re trying to measure said performance! And if, indeed, a later start time reduces teen mortality and crime, while at worst having no detrimental effect on ability to accomplish the main goal (ranking students), then pushing the school day forward an hour seems like a no-brainer. We should see parents, public officials, etc., advocating for it; we should see politicians adopting it as a campaign platform; and we should have, by now, seen it widely implemented.
Yet, with minor and insignificant exceptions, we don’t see this. Why not?
Because if you pushed the school day forward an hour, then, on average, many fewer parents would be able to take the kids to school on their own way to work.
Because while ranking kids by intelligence/conformism/whatever is one major function of public schools, another, and also very important, function is simply the fact of keeping kids attended, confined, and “out of trouble”, while their parents are at work.
(See also “after-school programs”. You cannot feasibly extend the school day past ~3 PM—the students will stop paying attention, teachers’ unions will revolt, etc.—but you’ve got to have some plausible reason to keep [at least some of] the kids in the building until their parents get off work and can come pick them up.)
One of the models how such weeding might happen is that you want some precentage of the students to fail. If you apply pressure the breaking point is reached faster. Making a change that helps everybody makes it so that you have to compare higher performance levels which is often harder than comparing low performance levels.
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