sleeping in

There is one important reason why York School students love Tuesday sleep-ins and morning spares, which is that their day does not get extended afterwards. However, if we were to universally push back school start times by an hour the school would still have to make up for the lost time somewhere, which most logically would then mean extending the end times by an hour also. After all, students can’t just miss out on an hour of class each day and expect that their grades will not drop. The York School (for middle and senior school students at least) already ends at 4, so an hour after that would be 5pm. If you then include the notorious TTC  that would mean students returning home around 6, which leaves no time for any extracurricular activities or even just hanging out with friends between the end of school and bed if you add in the extra factor of homework. Not to mention that being stuck in a classroom until 5pm by itself is pure misery.

But suppose that the York School stopped caring about academic performance and just slashed class times to maintain the same 4pm end time while starting the morning later than before. Even then, it is doubtful if such measures would have a positive impact on the rest that students receive. Since students are often irresponsible individuals, having more time does not mean that they will actually use that time effectively. An experiment in later school start times can be seen at the York School already by the 9 am start time (more or less) of senior school students, which is 40 minutes later than what they had in middle school. Their day still ends at 4pm, and it is 40 minutes that has been wholly gifted to them without any implications. Yet, all that I have heard is that senior school students are getting less sleep compared to what they had in middle school, not more. Of course, this could be partly due to the increased workload that comes with being in high school, but it is also undeniable that a lot of the potential rest time is instead squandered on video games or social media. In addition, shorter class times would also put more pressure on teachers to delegate more homework, since the class time that previously could have been spent doing homework now has to be scrapped and used for lectures instead. As someone who hates homework and would much rather finish assignments in class, that sounds like a nightmare to me. 

With all that being said, I do believe that it is more than reasonable to conclude that later school start times are a terrible idea. Students will simply grow accustomed to the new schedule and stay up even later than before, rendering the policy pointless. That is not even to mention the misery of ending school at 5pm, or the increased workload that would accompany having shorter class times if we were to maintain the 4pm end time. Then, is there anything that can be done to increase the sleep time of students and improve their mental health? One potential solution could be to implement mandatory nap times for students in the afternoon. However, that still means extra time that needs to be made up for somehow, and the issue of ending at 5pm still stands. The truth is that students, much akin to voters in an election, will always find a way to complain about whatever. In the west the ethos in recent years has always been that schools should teach, not educate; the school is only for the professional development of the student and not responsible for their private wellbeing. I would then argue that in a similar line the sleeping schedules of students is not really something the school should be accountable to fix. For highschool students especially, who would be going to college and going to work, they ought to be responsible for their own sleeping times and understand how to regulate their own schedules. Whatever the case, later school start times are not a viable solution.