OPINION - We Should Have Shorter School Days, by Grace Turner

 Please enjoy this opinion article from DMHS's "Introduction to Journalism" class!

Lots of people think that if we have longer school days and we are learning for more hours in a day that the students will succeed but that's not true, at least in my opinion. 

School days should be and need to be shorter.  A normal school day in America is 7 hours. Kids wake up at 6 am, get ready, leave at 7:30, arrive at the building at 8, then actually have to stay there until 3:50 with only an hour break for lunch and recess. It doesn’t make sense. It's exhausting for kids to be at school for that long, we are drained and tired. Why should we have to be in an environment that we don't like? School is filled with bullies, and drama, kids have to deal with that 5 days a week for 7 hours straight. This isn’t ok. America needs to change their education system. 

It doesn’t matter how many hours we are in school. According to The Penndulum, “In a worldwide comprehension assessment in 2016, Norway was one country that scored higher than the US. However, their school hours are from 8:15 a.m to 1:10 p.m. This shows that more time in school does not improve student success.” If we had less time at school students would be able to get more sleep and do lots of extracurricular activities. This could lead to kids being more happy and less tired in school. 

Schools in Norway start at 8:15 and end at 1:10. They have three breaks, one for lunch and two for fresh air. Unlike schools in America they get an hour and sometimes even less for lunch and recess. Another big thing about schools in Norway and schools in America is that usually students in the US  get to pick their own classes but in Norway you are required to take classes the government choses. In 11th and 12th grade students are able to choose between four options, math, science, literature, and language. Norway has a better education system because of this. It also has something to do with the structure of the schools, kids in Norway are learning harder content and actually practicing it when kids in the US are just memorizing what they learn. There are a lot less classes in Norway but students are getting more detail from the lessons/work and it is opposite in America. American students have a wide variety of classes but with a lot less detail. According to an article in Vice, “The focus of American education is often not on preparing students for the future, but on forcing them to memorize useless information like "the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell." The result, according to some education experts, is that American students basically learn nothing.”  The reason students in other countries are able to do more in a shorter school day is because they are not just memorizing information, but learning skills to prepare them for adult life. 

I think that if we have a better structure for teaching we will be able to have shorter school days and more free time. Let’s be like Norway and have shorter hours in school. 

Grace Turner is an 8th grader at DMHS.