Kudos to President Obama for understanding that the traditional nature of our schools, whether public, private, or charter, must change. His contention that the school day and the school year should be longer serves as a first step toward recognition of this fact. His position, understated as it must be as a political figure who wishes to sway the majority, at the very least has caused the conversations to begin in educational circles where such conversations should have started long before now, as each headmaster and supervisor in each school and district hastens to protect turf and quickly consider how a ground swell for change might effect the mission and efficacy of his/her school curriculum. Educators are stick-in-the-muds, for all the edu-garble that permeates the sacred halls, resplendent with such terms as ‘rubric’ and ‘mapping’ and ‘taxonomies’. Where schools should be pushing the agendas of adult societies in America, they instead reflect them, well after the fact. Need I refer to Darwin and the evolution of the species? The internet, as Friedman noted, has ‘flattened’ the world, but it has also ‘grown it up’, a phenomena less discussed. Every school child can now contribute to our world meaningfully, for good or ill, a resource that we cannot afford to ignore.
So let’s begin with Obama’s assertion that school days should be longer. The immediate retorts from the education communities are expected: “We must hire more teachers or pay current teachers more”, “Children are already tired from the length of the day and their performance will suffer”, “Children have limited focus capabilities”, and “Teachers have limited focus capabilities”. All of this is true and can not be ignored. But brain science tells us that the answer is not in simply lengthening the day, but the way in which we utilize the time.
§ Fact: Optimum learning for recall occurs between the hours of 10 am and 2 pm each day.[i]
§ Fact: Aerobic exercise before studies enhances assimilation.[ii]
§ Fact: Long term memory solidification occurs during the second sleep cycle, after 7 to 8 hours of sleep.[iii]
§ Fact: Circadian rhythms change for teens causing a sleep shift to an hour later.[iv]
§ Fact: Teens require more sleep than adults, not less.[v]
There is much more. Neuroscientists are gaining an understanding of how the brain learns at a tremendous rate, and while much of what they learn supports traditional teaching techniques, a significant body of work suggests that in many cases educators are expecting results that are, quite literally, impossible. Take a moment to mentally structure a school day for optimum learning utilizing the facts above. The results are more sleep and a later start that begins with a gym class in which every child is aerobically engaged, perhaps a snack, classes, electives and competitive sports. The day is established not from a mandate to learn longer, but from the science that suggests how to learn better.
When considering the length of the school year, there is little opposition to Obama’s assertion that it should be longer. The agrarian influence prevalent in many communities across the US that determined the school calendar when it was established in its current form indeed no longer exists. No doubt the traditional calendar is archaic. So have school all year. Why not? In for a penny, in for a pound…while making changes to the system, why not recognize the growing influences that demand change and will compel us to make greater change eventually anyway? And that is the growing individualized nature of teaching, the recognition of each child’s specific input, processing, and output style; his/her perspective, global or specific; his/her cultural influences; his/her preferred intelligence and brain chemistry; his/her emotional intelligence and developmental growth. But I do not propose that each child is engaged in formalized education all year round – all work and no play does indeed make Jack a dull boy, according to science – rather I suggest that school itself goes year round with 4 or 5 terms, and that students (and teachers) establish a track for themselves within the year that suits them best as individuals. Now we can have classes and choices that reflect a society where information is gained at the touch of a finger, brain diversity is assumed, and there is ample time for social and character education.
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