What if school didn't take all day?

How about surf from dawn to 11, school from 11 to 3, then back out on the water till 7. Sound good?

The public middle schools in Atlanta (and many other cities) have a school day that lasts for seven hours.

On top of this, students have homework — anywhere from zero (if you skip it) to three hours.

That doesn’t even take into account commuting and stuff. A twelve-year-old is spending seven to ten hours a day working.

That is a very long time to spend doing something that you didn’t choose, but what makes it especially painful is that it’s not particularly effective. There is no guarantee that a student is actually learning what is supposed to be learned.

Even worse, there is no guarantee that the student’s individual needs will be met. Whether they have already mastered the material or they are clueless and in need of more help, they might have to continue taking the same class as everyone else.

In a homeschool setting, however, a student’s work can be designed to target the exact areas where practice is most needed. Once that is accomplished and the student has made sufficient progress for the day, he can move on to additional tasks and projects of his choosing.

He might complete his daily academic requirements in just three hours, spending the rest of his day reading, strengthening his skills in the arts or athletics, making things, serving a cause he cares about, or working as an apprentice in a field of interest.

If satisfying his daily academic requirements takes five or six hours because he’s in need of remediation or happens to work slowly, then it’s especially beneficial to have that extra time available due to homeschooling. Otherwise, those extra two or three hours would have to happen late in the afternoon or evening, when everyone is exhausted and not operating at peak capacity.

No one can be fully alert and focused for hour after hour, and to expect this is to teach people to ignore the cues from their minds and bodies that it’s time to take a break or switch activities. This is actually something I have to deliberately re-teach my students and employees.

An energized, engaged person can accomplish more in one intense hour than they could in four or five hours of dutifully “paying attention” in school. And if they’re working on the right material because it’s designed especially for them, even better.

It’s a distortion to treat school as a child’s “work” or simply as full-time childcare. The purpose of school isn’t to simply put in the time. Kids are learning and growing and preparing for real life — and real life, for those fortunate enough to be reading an article on the Internet, doesn’t actually require us to be cooped up for long hours against our will.

If we don’t like the life we’re leading, we can change it. Kids can’t unless we let them — and we should let them.