Anonymous wrote:I recently learned that kids in many places around the world only go to school for half days through much of elementary. Like it's common to go to school from 8:30am to 12:30 or 1:30pm in many countries, including Scandinavia and much of Western Europe. You can get some idea here:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/02/school-days-how-the-u-s-compares-with-other-countries/
As a parent of a child in early elementary, this makes so much sense to me. So much of their school day is filler (shuffling between classrooms, lining up in hallways, etc.) and with these little kids, the time in the afternoon spent on academics is probably not that useful because they are tired and unfocused by then. My child often does special like music, forcing language and art for part of the morning, which results in more transition time getting to and from the special, and also means that more academics are pushed to after lunch when kids are tired.
I like the idea of a more compressed school day with less random filler -- let the kids spend the entire morning in one class room with the same teacher, focusing pretty exclusively on academic subjects. Then send them to lunch, and then aftercare starts and that when you get in music, art, PE, etc. It just makes obvious sense. The idea of a 7-8 hour school day for a kid who is 6 or 7 just does not make sense.
If we did this, we could also start shifting a lot of the stuff that teachers now get tasked with to the looser after care environment. The social emotional learning, the focused help for high risk kids who need extra interventions. etc. would all likely be better provided in an after-care environment instead of during the school day when kids are already focused on academic concepts.
Studies also show that there are seriously diminishing returns when it comes to knowledge acquisition over long periods of time, and that more mental breaks actually helps with knowledge retention.
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