Educating Kids in American Schools: Early-Morning Zombies Subject to the Status

Quo
It is natural to assume that the people in the business of educating children are
highly committed to the dissemination of knowledge. That many schooladministrators would stand by, and even enable the continuance of practices that
compromise learning is difficult to believe; that fallacious reasoning would be used
could only be reckoned as highly bizarre, and oxymoronic. Yet all this applies to
dragging kids to school before their bodies have woken up.
In 2014, the American Academy of Pediatrics advised middle and high school
administrators to begin the school-day no earlier than 8:30 a.m. to allow teens
who are biologically programmed to stay up later than adultsto get the
recommended 8.5 to 9.5 hours of sleep nightly. 1 In the 2011-2012 school-year, the
average start-time for 39,700 public middle, high, and combined schools was 8:03
a.m.; 83 percent of the schools began before 8:30. 2
To Safwan Badr, a past president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, the
early start-times make absolutely no sense. Youre asking kids to learn math at a
time their brains are not even awake.3 In fact, we have made a virtue out of it, as
per the adage, the early bird gets the worm. Parents praise their kids for waking up
early for school, wholly unaware that the virtue may actually be a vice. Nietzsche
would hardly be surprised, as he wrote of modern morality as decadenteven a
weapon. Hence, we should question our moral truths, rather than simply take them
as a given.
Strangely, many school administrators readily accepted the compromised learning
in order to make room for after-school sporting eventsas if academics were
secondary in a school.4 Its a logistical nightmare, said Daniel Domenech of the
School Superintendents Association.5 As if being the status quo could serve as a
justification, he adds, This has been going on forever, and kids have been
graduating from school and going on to college. 6 Just because a practice has
longevity does not mean that improvement does not apply. Indeed, a long-standing
practice, such as slavery, may be in fierce need of correction. That kids have been
graduating from high school and going on to college does not mean that such kids
couldnt be better-equipped intellectually as they matriculate, and that still more
kids could make it to college.
On a Saturday when I was in my hometown, I stopped by the library at the junior
college. Arriving shortly after 1 p.m., I was bewildered to find the hours were 8 a.m.
to 1 p.m. even during the school year. I approached an early-elderly woman working
in the small coffee shop across the hall from the librarys entrance. I expressed my
astonishment that anyone would think that students would wake up early on a
Saturday morning to go to the library. Indeed, on another occasion I witnessed the
library nearly empty on a Saturday morning. The woman dismissed my assertion

that afternoon hours would be more optimal. If that were better, the college would
have tried it and kept it, she claimed. She was positing the status quo as being a
justification, and thus of value in itself. Additionally, she was assuming that people
afraid of change would not only embrace improvement, but also with near
omniscience. It is also possible, I replied, that the obvious did not occur to the
administrators. Ironically, people clutching the status quo may be most likely to
miss the obvious staring them in the face. That this would apply to school
administrators, who are in the business of educating students, is especially
damning.

1 Liz Szabo, Class Times Too Early For Teens, USA Today, August 7, 2015.
2 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Szabo, Class Times.
3 Szabo, Class Times.
4 At Yale, I took a senior-level course on American schools. During a discussion on the
purpose of schools, I was stunned that I was the only student defending the antiquated
position that the learning of academic knowledge is and ought to be the primary purpose.
Many of my fellow students seemed intent to remake schools into social-service agencies
that happen to disseminate knowledge. Doubtlessly, those students had forgotten (or
were taking for granted) what had gotten them to Yale.
5 Szabo, Class Times.
6 Ibid.