Do you think school should be five days a week?
I don't know where you are but where I grew up and live now school has always been 5 days a week. I don't understand the controversy. But I'll add it is fortuitous if the school week coincides with whatever the work week happens to be, because most parents work and when kids are out of school a parent often needs to oversee them. If you changed to a 4 day a week school day then for many families one of the parents has to take their 5th day off of work to stay home with the kids, which burns up their vacation days and is a drag on family morale. 1
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The controversy is that kids are in school too much. Having so many kids in a publicly run institution for so many hours in a day makes many parents wary. That is why so many parents have their kids in homeschool. If it were somehow decided that kids were in school too much and there needed to be a four day or even a three day school week, what a parent does during those school hours should NOT be taken into account. We can't say children should go to school more because parents work and can't watch them. Schools aren't babysitting services even if they are being reduced to that. We are deciding what is best for children after all.... Statistics on the reasons given for homeschooling do not attribute it to "so many hours in a day makes many parents wary." https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ That's a scenario you dreamed up. The reasons for homeschooling overwhelmingly are religion or paranoia about safety. As for "what a parent does during those school hours should NOT be taken into account" you already simply don't understand that entire communities had input into what exists now as the school system. School committees, PTAs, teachers, government oversight agencies, attorneys for the oppressed or disadvantaged, student body governments, all for many decades have had a voice which collectively evolved to what we have now. It's an insult to every advocate who ever stuck up for the students to imply that the adults are wreckless and selfish for not having a three day school week. Finally, I think it's amusing that your profile was created literally the same hour you responded to my comment and the number of participations you've had could be counted on one hand. You chose to join, literally, so you could throw home schooling back at me and tell me parents don't matter. You're likely just another fake extra avatar from one of the regulars who stirs things up in here. I think children with different temperaments require variant approaches. Some children simply need to be allowed to follow their innate curiousity where others need more structure and discipline or they will end up seriously underdeveloped. I am sure our systematic cookie cutter approach is nowhere near flexible enough, and stoking kids innate curiosity is nowhere near the priority it should be. Learning needs to be part of how we live..all day everyday. 1
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I don't know whether this is support for the topic of a shorter school week or against but i wholeheartedly agree. Kids don't all learn the same. Pertaining to the topic i was going to mention this anyway because in the current public school model of classrooms, students don't get hardly any individualized attention. in classrooms of 20 to 25 students (some even larger than that) there is simply no way to give any one child the attention they need without compromising time with the other students. Yes we have tutoring and homework but if we are going to do a lot of that then why have a classroom at all? This is why so many parents are opting for homeschooling or alternative schooling (like online classrooms) making it feasible to not even have a five day school week. Schools aimed at kids of a younger age should only be 4 days in my opinion. This gives the child 3 days of rest and gives them a chance to, you know, be a damn kid. Enjoy their life. It also means that they won't have a bunch of homework they have to somehow get through in just 2 days. However, as they get older and get into serious school, the days should be 5 days long as it is getting serious at that point and they need to be learning. |