President Obama is in favor of lengthening the time that kids would spend in school. His argument revolves mainly along the idea that other countries have longer school years and days, so to compete with them, the United States ought to as well. However, as expected, there is a lot of resistance to this idea.
Current students obviously see the situation as disappearing leisure time, both alone and with friends. Those students whose schools have already implemented a longer school day do grudgingly agree that their grades have improved in the time that they’ve been attending, but widespread accounts of learning fatigue continue as counter-arguments.
If I have to take a side, I’d have to say that I’m against a longer school year and days myself. In my mind, it’s about more than just longer hours; it’s a matter of how the regular hours are spent. Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson has spoken at the influential TED Conference about how rigid teaching systems are killing creativity in our citizens. More time is spent in rote memorization of facts and less time on nurturing the creative impulse. Children with restless minds chafe when being forced to learn things they’re really not interested in; do we really expect that spending more time feeling frustrated and bored will help that?
There is obviously a base level of competence that must exist for people to survive in society, but that can’t possibly take so much extra time that it requires a longer school day and year. It might be too late to change the way education is conducted in this country — adapting to the way each individual child learns, rather than the cookie-cutter method most schools employ now — but a longer year doesn’t seem to be the answer.
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