Me too, man

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41582-025-01106-6

Abstract: "Aspects of modern society, such as artificial lighting and rigid schedules, create ‘social jetlag’ — a mismatch between biological chronotypes and societal demands. This circadian misalignment particularly affects evening chronotypes, leading to sleep deprivation, mental health issues and physical disorders. Flexible schedules and environmental modifications could restore natural sleep patterns and improve well-being."

the timings for school and its length were not dictated by health needs nor education needs.

it was chosen to match parents work schedule, and to aclimatize children to factory work.

so its not out of ignorance of the childs well-being, but indifference to it

it was chosen to match parents work schedule
I can't find a good source, but from what I've seen its actually student work schedules that dictate school start times.
Elementary and Middle Schools tend to start much later in the day (in part to conserve buses). But local Chambers of Commerce and Rotary Club groups will often lobby for earlier high school start times so that students are out of school in time for a 5pm work shift.
- In some countries the school start at 6.30 AM so that parents can take their children to school before they start work at 8 AM.

High school teacher here. Obviously, I don't speak for everyone, but many of us wish school would start at a more reasonable time for students. We don't enjoy trying to teach first (and second, and third) period classes where many students are either absent or asleep. And of course, we care about the students and know it would be much healthier for them to sleep in. School can start around 10:00, thanks. But, as others have pointed out, the schedule is not dictated by what is best for the students.

Edit: some of the students in the schools I work at have to get up around 5:00. The often wait for 30+ minutes for buses to come (but that is a "the district doesn't care about the students" issue, not a start time issue).

Could've gone to bed earlier.

Pouting intensifies
- I mean I didn't do that either when I was a kid but it was my own fault because I definitely could've hah. Still guilty of staying up way too long occasionally.
Just dodge bro.
- Skill issue

Since the whole problem lies with parents' work schedule, we should all push work time to begin at 10am instead of 8am, so kids can get to school a bit later in the morning. Everybody gets to sleep a bit more. Problem fucking solved

But then I would have to work until 8pm. That sounds horrible.
- 7pm if you take an hour lunch, 6pm if you don't take a lunch.
  I've worked a 10-7 shift before. Some people hated it, but I actually loved it. I got to stay up every night to a reasonable 12-1, okay videogames with friends, slept until a nice morning, woke up and drove to work. It was by far the best work shift time I've ever had. It also helped that I lived 3 minutes away, so I would literally wake up at like 9, sss, then drive to work. Saved so much gas at that job hahaha. I'd fill up my Corolla like once a month as long as I didn't visit friends too much. And I was in an apartment with underground parking, so the uv damage to my car was like nothing.
  The only downside is you don't get to do errands during the week. Which.... If you plan very very well isn't an issue, but more often than not was an issue.

I was in my late 20s when I realised just how much stress morning stuff is causing me, and had caused me for two decades.
\ (my solution was just to come to the office at 11 most days & now I also sleep more hours on average, but that's is a separate issue for me)

I was an incredibly angsty teenager, mad at the world and hostile to just about everyone by default. Apathetic, grumpy, and uninterested in physical activity or the things I liked as a preteen.

After having a baby and getting very little sleep for 6 months I recognized some of my old patterns. Turns out, it wasn't just part of being a teen, I was chronically sleep deprived. I was up at 6am most days back then, when I would sleep until 1pm on weekends. I think a lot of teens are unfairly characterized as angry and defiant when they're operating on half or a quarter of the sleep they need.

Ah yes, I remember those accusations of grumpiness. It’s the classic “MY issues are because of the circumstances around me. YOUR issues are because that’s just who you are.” The lack of empathy so many adults express is truly concerning.

The way I see it, you're probably freest from the ages one to four Around the age of five you're shipped away for your body to be stored They promise education, but really they give you tests and scores And they predictin' prison population by who scoring the lowest

So much of the education system is centered on child abuse and grooming children to accept abuse as adults

Also it's affordable daycare for kids so parents can work.
- That's the real reason it starts early: so two working parents can get the kids out the door and then still have time to get to work themselves
- So it's a cycle of abuse then
https://genius.com/Run-the-jewels-walking-in-the-snow-lyrics
Knew I'd heard this somewhere. RTJ is just 💋 🤌
Many African American slaves did not know they were slaves until about age 6, because they were not given work when too young to be useful. Sounds familiar...
- Going to school is not comparable to literal slavery

One reason for the early starts for high schools is that by staggering the start times for high school, middle school, and elementary school, school districts can use fewer buses and fewer drivers. If all the schools started at the same (more reasonable) time, you'd need three times as many buses and drivers and each driver would only get one or two hours a day (and thus would find something else to do, making the existing shortage of drivers even worse). The district I drive for has a transportation budget of about $3 million a year - we would not be able to afford $9 million a year and still afford our administrators' enormous salaries.

If you just started all schools later by an hour, the elementary school kids would start at 9:30 AM which would not work out very well, either.

East Asian countries solve this by having the kids take public transit; just run a few extra buses and trains on the routes kids take, then you don't need dedicated vehicles that sit idle all day.
- With trains all you have to do is add an extra passenger car or two for the peak times and keep the number of trains running the same. You could also increase frequency during peak times if you have the track, train and driver availability to do that
- Not sure which ones you're talking about, but in Hong Kong, schoolchildren just walk to school. There's usually a school attached to each housing estate.
- I think los angeles does this too, now.
If I remember correctly most of the suggestions to account for that actually has elementary and middle schoolers start before high schoolers since high schoolers are the ones that need the most sleep while also struggling the most to go to sleep early
My school district solves this by not having busses at all
deleted by creator
- Huh, that's curious. I'm actually a school bus driver and I've been driving high school kids for four years now. Your use of "transit passes" makes me think you're not a United Statesian.
- Yours might not, but do you really think that's the case everywhere?

Now think about what your parents went through

i highkey think school as it stands is child abuse.

i'm not a pedagogue or educator so i'm not versed on how to really articulate it, just had a constant feeling school was useless for learning, and felt like fucking prisons (and in retrospect i still think that's true).

school 100% stunted my potential big time and i still fucking hate it for doing this and more. free our youth.

I left school around 9th grade, did "homeschool" which amounted to basically just watching documentaries and smoking weed and now I'm one of the highest earners out of everyone I originally went to school with. From being that weird poor kid who always got bullied to being quite comfortable- life is fuckin' weird.
- to be fair i learned more in life from weed and documentaries than i ever did from actual school. you are justified in doing great.
this image really resonated with me:
it's from futurama btw, great show, i'm just re-watching it :D
- This image inflicted mental damage on me :’(
  Futurama really can tug the heartstrings.
School is just to prepare you for working in a capitalistic hellhole.
- my country has been expanding the 48+ hour workweek instead of 40 for the last while, and sure enough schools are more and more starting to follow it.
My highschool used the same blueprints as the local prison, so.. yep that all tracks and they don’t even try to hide it.
I learned more math from Khan Academy. If I knew about it, I would have started Khan Academy as soon as it existed (and bitcoin mining)

My mental health radically improved my senior year when I was ahead on credits and could skip the first block of classes each morning.

And god forbid your circadian rhythm doesn't align and you fall asleep in class.

You can get referred for a drug test because only high people fall asleep during the day.

I have always struggled with sleep onset insomnia. In an ideal world, I'd probably sleep from around 5 am until noon, and my best working hours are from 7pm until 11pm, without fail. Even when I am exhausted from forcing myself to get up early for an extended period, I'll still perk up in the late evening, and struggle to sleep before 3am. This combined awfully with school.
I remember once that I was so exhausted, I literally fell asleep while walking, and I didn't wake up when I hit the floor. What's striking in hindsight is how little sympathy there was. I wasn't accused of being a drug user, but there were plenty of comments about laziness, which is absurd given that I was obviously severely exhausted.
A friend was the primary carer for a disabled relative, and this required her to get up at 5am each day, and to get up during the night to administer medication. She would often fall asleep in class, and she frequently got detention for this (which she would then often need to skip, to ensure she could get home in time to pick up siblings from school). Speaking with her years later, she lamented that if teachers had been more sympathetic and actually tried to understand what was going on here, it might've led to there being formal support to care for her relative. The amount of work she was doing was absurd for anyone, let alone a 13 year old, but she didn't know this, let alone that there were support channels to help young carers like her.
I had a friend trauma & sleep psychology profesor visiting; she said improvement of school performance with better scheduling was proven in few real life (cross-sectional?) studies.

Yea that only happens because capitalism needs your parents to slave their ass off which can only happen if their kids go to school earlier than their already early starting job

Generally, I don't think that applies to high schoolers. They can manage themselves in the morning. We should have their school start last
America also has some deep structural issues that children aren't able to get to school by themselves. In Japan, grade school children are able to get to and from school by themselves in most of the country. In America, parents aren't allowed to leave children unattended, and certainly aren't allowed to let them go to school alone
- Yea missed the part about high school but those time schedules pretty much sum up my primary school times as well, hence why the reply. high school is a bit of a grey area depending on the country, I agree.

You can't cause delinquency if you're too busy getting 8 hours of sleep.

In my 30s and I'm still mad about it.

Especially considering how much time at school was an absolute waste.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2017/04/why-early-school-start-times-are-a-threat-to-public.html

https://time.com/7202888/stop-early-school-start-times-essay/

We've known this for decades, but almost no districts will make the changes necessary. The youngest grades (K-4 or 5) should be the first schools to start in the morning, and the HS the last.
What happens when that is suggested is people balk at either sports programs needing to be cut or the argument that the older siblings need to be out of school to babysit the younger siblings.
- Yep, exactly.
  Almost 30 years now we've known that shifting around the school schedule by roughly a max of 2 hours would result in significantly improved learning across the board, for basically 0 cost... and we don't do it.
  America is a scam.
- well modern public schools are basically glorified daycares.
  awful start time policies being the norm never changes despite the massive mountain of evidence it should because parents typically need to go into work in the morning. society collectively decided shafting kids’ sleep schedules by starting school before the already absurdly early 9-5 was the best we could do on that compromise.
  and to an extent, that’s true, because we’d have to reform a lot more than just schools to effectively implement this change. there just isn’t the will in the public sphere to push this.

Started 7:15, lived an hour by bus away so I woke up at 5:10. Bus was at 5:36. That was some uphill both ways shit for me. We did have weekly intermittent afternoon and morning schedules though. So one week we'd start at 7:15 and one week it started at like 2PM. Afternoon weeks were nice when I'd come home at like 9 or 10PM.

Sounds like that would make it impossible to maintain a consistent sleep schedule, which is also helpful.
- Just preparing everyone for shift work in the mines.

It's nuts to me that American schools start so early. Ours had first bell around 8:30. By high school is was closer to nine.

In Hungary they also start between 7:15-7:45; I kinda loved it as we would finish the day earlier
My kids start school at 8:20 and I was amazed how late American school starts (and inconvenient for working parents). My school started at 7:30 when I was their age in Eastern Europe.

Every year I tell timetabling "don't inflict 9am classes on my students, it provably punishes poorer students (commute costs) and drives poor engagement", every year they ignore me.

Many of your teachers hated morning classes too.

for years my mom forced us to go.to bed at 8pm ( I only.rebel.when I was about 12). All my childhood. Mind you we didn't had phones so we would be there on the bed in the dark THINKING. And that's why I have anxiety.

I would stare at walls, as I literally had no entertainment, and overthink the world. I reached some very fucked up conclussions.
That 22:34 on the alarm clock always made me something. Like a magic number. Now I'll be tired tomorrow.

Nothing lowkey about it. Shit's fucked up.

i still have nightmares about school

I understand that studies have been done and show that early start times hurt some student performance. I'm not contesting that is true for many, but it didn't seem to affect me or my friends.

We all played sports so we had 6:15 start times for morning practice or workouts. I lived about 3 miles from my high school (and even further from my middle school, which also had morning workouts), and was responsible for getting myself there. I rode my bike, or skated, with my sports equipment 4 or 5 days a week.

Class from 8 to 3:30, then afternoon practice or competitions until about 6:15. This required me to make and bring two meals to school. I was rarely home before 7:15, so that's a 13 hour day at school Mon-Fri, then homework. On weekends I played club sports and found time to socialize. Thankfully I didn't have to work during the school year until I found a internship at the end of my senior year.

I had all AP or honors classes, so academics weren't exactly easy, but I got good grades, as did my friend group.

Was it easy? No. Did I have fun and enjoy my time? Hell yeah. My days were full, we didn't have time for video games, and social media didn't exist.

I'm lucky that I had supportive parents and a stable home life. They paid the bills and made sure there was food in the fridge, but I was expected to do everything else on my own.

I'm certain that experience made me who I am today, mostly responsible, productive, and confident I can handle whatever this crazy world comes up with. Stuff doesn't always go my way, but I'm prepared mentally and emotionally to deal with it.

I remember having a similar schedule and falling asleep in virtually every after-lunch Calculus class. Just passed right out every day. Then pulled it together for my last class and extracurriculars.
Like, sure, I guess it worked out in the end. But I'd hardly call this good public policy, broadly speaking.
- Agreed, we can certainly do better. I was hopeful that hybrid classes would eventually work well, but it seems post COVID we've figured out how to mess that up too.
  Connectivity, teachers funded and equipped to handle an online class component, a home environment capable of being supportive for students, parents who aren't in a situation that requires them to work 3 jobs to make rent so instead they can actively participate in their children's education.
  We've got a long way to go and I'm pessimistic.
I lived about 3 miles from my high school
lol. I lived 9 miles away. I think the person who lived furthest away on my bus route was 11 miles. I don't think my bus was the farthest away either.
- That's pretty far, but I'm happy you had a bus. That wasn't an option given how early I was going to school, so it was a bike or a skateboard for me. That makes for some very early mornings, but everything worked out, and somehow I made my way.
  I understand not everyone is equipped for early mornings, and I certainly don't look down on anyone for that. The downvotes on my post were entirely predictable, it just sucks that if your personal experience doesn't align with whatever is popular among Lemmy users you get shat on.
  Shit is hard, I get it, but with a little help some of us can navigate it and figure our lives out.
I remember having a similar schedule and falling asleep in virtually every after-lunch Calculus class. Just passed right out every day. Then pulled it together for my last class and extracurriculars.
Like, sure, I guess it worked out in the end. But I'd hardly call this good public policy, broadly speaking.

Yep. Ours went from 0830 or so to 3:30. But it was a somewhat rural area, so if you took the bus you’d have to be on the bus by 0730-45, which means getting up at 0700 or so, and not getting home until after 4 pm. Then there was homework…

And god forbid you do a sport or have a job after school

Schools - and some businesses - see getting up early as some kind of achievement, a trait to be proud of. A thought that was mirrored in the influencer scene with the insane 'grindset' videos. Get up early and get done more than the others... Completely ignoring that the amount of sleep we need doesn't change with how early you get up.

Some people get up early and have no problem with that, but that's not the case for everyone. In the dawn of time, it was better to have some people who get up early and some who prefer to stay up late: that way the tribe was better protected because the time where everyone was sleeping was minimized.

Now everyone who biologically tends to be more productive when they can work late and get up late is painted as lazy and forced to work against their inner clock.

At one workplace we had 2 sysadmins, one who takes sleeping pills at 7, is up at 5am and would make sure everything is up and running before anyone has even thought about going into the office, and another who stays up late and sleeps in. The end result was really good out of hours coverage for emergencies.
Actually, many teachers oppose early start times, and perfect attendance awards are disappearing every year, too.

I remember in high school we had before school weight lifting which started so early. So start with that, do a full day of class, after school sports and then homework before doing it again. Pretty crazy how many things were crammed in a day.

Schools near me have shifted high school start times to later. Its been that was for years now.

It is really weird to see it in mainstream news now, and even RFK is for it (that fucking weirdo).

I thought letting teens sleep in late was blue state woke and would never be nationwide.

Fox news found a Hypnotist that said teens should sleep later. A hypnotist... really fox? Even when they are right they are still stupid fucks.

Fox news found a Hypnotist that said teens should sleep later
Probably just the only "expert" in their rollodex who answered and said they were available

In middle school, I took what we called 0 period PE so that I could do a double band period (symphonic and jazz) and that shit started at 640. Thankfully that was only 2 years, and these days I hate waking up before 730.

I had to teach a zero period jazz band when I student taught. Waking up that early to drive the 45 minutes suuuuuckkkked

Hey what's wrong with going to bed at 8pm

Well, when you get out of your after school activities around 1700-1800 hours, and then have to spend another hour or two, minimum, on homework and projects, and then want to have a little bit of socializing and play squeezed in after the required time spent with family....
Yeah, good luck with that 8pm thing.
The solace of burgling some joy out of life for the day despite its inevitable cost for tomorrow? I thought we all knew this

Just abuse in general. Descartes died because he had to wake up early.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes#Death

My high school and middle school (they were right next to each other and shared buses) started at 7:15 AM, half the year it was dark when the bus picked us up and we lived in the far south where days didn't get super short. It was bullshit then and it is bullshit now. It was nice to get out of school before 2PM I guess.

Unpopular opinion, even if people didn’t wake up at 6:30 people would still be complaining [insert time here] is to early

Highschool used to start at 7:00 for me. Then I got into college and I could make my own schedule, so I picked a lot of afternoon classes, it was awesome.

I guess I never really thought about it. Although now that i have kids that are young, I have to get my kid on a 7:20am bus, which means im up at like 6:45am, every school day, and it sucks. Then I relax for another hour and a half before I start my work at 9 am, lol. I will say the only nice part of starting that early is that they are done by like 2:45 while I am still working until 5 or 6 pm.

When I was able to drive to school I stopped showing up on time and just went in when I was done sleeping and getting ready at my own pace.

That's about how ours went. I usually went to bed around midnight, and usually would fall asleep during some class or another.

I recently found a report card from my senior year, apparently I took AP Economics that year and it was the last class of the day for me. I don't remember doing it at all, but I was getting an A- at the time.

I'm sure those two little personal stories are unrelated.

Just go to bed at 8pm.

Teens' circadian rhythm doesn't let them get tired before 10pm.
- I haven't seen any research like that. Could you link it for me, please?

Nevermind that I had also been up until 1am having a complete crying breakdown because the printer wouldn't work for whatever assignments. And had only gotten home at 8pm due to extracurriculars running so late.

Half of what public school teaches is just tax-funded brainwashing programs

(Private religious schools are 100% pure brainwashing)

7:10 for me!

If they woke up at 6am and caught the bus at 6:40, how is 40 minutes not enough time to get ready?

Depends, I guess. If you’re healthy and have good organizational habits and are confident with someone who makes your breakfast and takes care of everything else while you eat, brush, poop, and dress before walking to the bus stop - and don’t need to be particularly coherent - 40 minutes sounds like plenty.
- Why would you need anyone else? My entire morning routine is around 30 minutes and has been from childhood to adulthood. This includes poop, shower, brush, clothes. As a child it was breakfast like cereal. As an adult it's homemade coffee and a banana or bagel. When I worked at a hospital, I'd often get an egg sandwich made in the cafeteria or eggs and other typical American foods for breakfast.
  Only recently working from home have I now graduated to making my own eggs, and sometimes egg sandwich. Takes all of 7 minutes.

The human REM sleep cycle is 90 minutes long. As long as your sleep in multiples of 90 minutes, you'll feel rested. 9 hrs or 6 hours would work but not 10 hours or 30 minutes.

Edit: I meant the entire non-REM and REM sleep stages altogether and not just the specific section of REM.

My ~~German~~ Garmin tracks my sleep daily and I’ve never had a REM stage of sleep be 90 minutes.
- I don't have a German that would track my sleep :(
- I don't know about your German (har har), but I'm not very confident in what my Garmin or any fitness watch detects on sleep. I got a Garmin to replace my FitBit, wore them both for a while, and saw they didn't have much consensus on sleep data.
- I don't think this tracking can be that accurate.