President Obama wants to increase the amount of time that students spend in school. It's simply a blatantly bad idea. Our children already spend to many hours in school as is, the problem with our education system is not the amount of time spent in the class room. It is our culture.
Our culture does not value education as a whole. We do not praise our academic acheivements in the same way that we do our sports acheivements. We don't reward children for excelling. Far from it we actually punish our children for excelling, particularly those who aren't planning on attending a major University. Instead of looking at a child who is obviously to advanced for a given class and letting them test out of the class and take the next class and graduating early we put them in harder classes. I can speak from personal experience that it doesn't encourage your average student.
We don't hold our teachers to any standards other than don't sleep with the students. There is no incentive for them to get their students to test better or acheive more.
Many parents do not want to involve themselves in their child's education. Many SCers have mentioned that it is the Teacher's job to teach and the parents job to parent. If teacher can't teach they shouldn't be paid. Again it's a culture thing. Parents should take an active part in their child's education, not just helping with homework and not just piling on extra study material as well but discussing things with them. Being parents basically.
The bottom line is that if more hours were the answer then we'd already be leading. We already spend more time in school than many nations who out test us. Japan for example spends 1005 hours vs our 1146. So for the record that is almost six more days, not a week more but six full 24 hour hour days. Split into 8 hour school days (I think school is actually closer to 7 but whatever. I hate math.) it becomes seventeen extra days or nearly a month. This is a particularly relevant comparison because the Japaness spend more DAYS in school than us but they ration their time in a way that is clearly as if not more effective than our own.
Bottom line is we need to change our culture if we want an improvement on education. Not chain children to desks longer.
