UK Conservatives draw up plan for 9 hour school days - Polidicks

Doesn't sound that bad. At my school we already had 8 hour days. I suppose I don't entirely have a good understanding of the UK education system, but 8 hours in a day really wasn't bad at all and didn't leave me mentally "exhausted". If anything, I enjoyed it more since I could socialize around a bit and not have to be home.

[QUOTE=Zareox7;43729091]Doesn't sound that bad. At my school we already had 8 hour days. I suppose I don't entirely have a good understanding of the UK education system, but 8 hours in a day really wasn't bad at all and didn't leave me mentally "exhausted". If anything, I enjoyed it more since I could socialize around a bit and not have to be home.[/QUOTE] Primary and secondary schools in the uk are generally around 6 to 7 hours a day. Sixth Form (Junior and Senior years at high school in the US) tends to vary since most sixth forms have broken up timetables, for example, my thursdays always started at lunch time and ended at 4, and my wednesdays always ended at 1. Though it can very depending whether the sixth form is a sixth form college or a sixth form tacked onto a secondary school (though those are dying out). Realistically speaking, a normal student can only truly concentrate for about half an hour at most, so an hour lesson generally works if the teacher is good enough to break things up into decent sized chunks that keeps the flow going nicely, though students younger than 16 tend to get bored and restless by the end of the day, so a shorter school day generally works out better. If the school day was made longer, students would get really bored really quickly at the dread of spending a long time in school. It doesn't help that most schools tend to care more about the school uniforms, hairstyles and shoes of students than the actual learning of students, which creates needless tension which just wastes more time and disrupts lessons and the learning of other students.

What, it was bad enough keeping kids in school until they're 18 (although can hardly call them "kids" by that point), how the hell are they supposed to get any real life experience? Parents will be seeing hardly anything of there children. This is yet another reason I doubt I'll have kids, but if I do it certainly won't be in this country.

[QUOTE=Coffee;43729242]Primary and secondary schools in the uk are generally around 6 to 7 hours a day. Sixth Form (Junior and Senior years at high school in the US) tends to vary since most sixth forms have broken up timetables, for example, my thursdays always started at lunch time and ended at 4, and my wednesdays always ended at 1. Though it can very depending whether the sixth form is a sixth form college or a sixth form tacked onto a secondary school (though those are dying out). Realistically speaking, a normal student can only truly concentrate for about half an hour at most, so an hour lesson generally works if the teacher is good enough to break things up into decent sized chunks that keeps the flow going nicely, though students younger than 16 tend to get bored and restless by the end of the day, so a shorter school day generally works out better. If the school day was made longer, students would get really bored really quickly at the dread of spending a long time in school. It doesn't help that most schools tend to care more about the school uniforms, hairstyles and shoes of students than the actual learning of students, which creates needless tension which just wastes more time and disrupts lessons and the learning of other students.[/QUOTE] Ah and that's why I didn't want to particularly say for or against this. I know back in school for me, we had hour long classes, and we had about 8 of them a day. It worked out pretty well I thought.

During junior-high, we had a system in which three-four hours after the regular schoolday was over, you could choose to stay in school, and do your homework there. And if you had a hard time in a subject, you could go to certain classrooms, within which the relevant teachers were to give you efficient assistance with the work. It was a system I rather liked, seeing as you could turn "School" and "Home" into two separate worlds.

i couldn't bare staying in school for another 3 hours. if i have a row of studies at the end or beginning of a day, i'll go in/leave early and study at home; which i do much better than in the frankly irritating study hall environment

How about the other way? Make the school day shorter, lower homework loads, reduce if not outright remove standardized test bullshit, and improve the [i]quality[/i] of school. Four hours a day in a quality school staffed by competent teachers is far better for kids than 8 hours of crappy regurgitated bullshit.[QUOTE=Terminutter;43724284] I don't really think we need to force ourself into the problem where kids have so little time to do anything that they obsess over schoolwork to nothing else, costing them their childhoods and huge parts of their social lives..[/QUOTE] We pretty much already have. I had it relatively easy and I was still assigned so much homework that there was no way in hell I could get a proper night's sleep, do it all and go to school. And I didn't even have a tenth as many standardized tests that Brits get. We only had one in all of high school, taken in Jr year, and even that wasn't exactly a "Fail this and die" situation.......it was also so easy a sixth grader could have aced it...IMO the only thing a long school day does is make it convenient on parents who work 9-5 jobs, and at that point school is little more than daycare 2.0.

Cant wait to go to college later on this year no more drastic changes to education for my year...

It seems to me that there's a real problem with the emphasis on sports in the US. Back when I was in high school, athletes would routinely be allowed to leave classes early so they could drive to other schools. Also, a lot of them would turn in assignments two or three weeks late, get a shitty report card, and still be allowed to stay. I know there was a hushed-up scandal about one of the coaches - his athletes would get perfect grades, despite never turning anything in. The school didn't fire him, as his team always got major awards at the end of the year. The administration also built a new stadium area for a few million and proudly displayed sport trophies in the lobby, but also cut the last computer class they offered, which mostly consisted of Microsoft Office lessons. We did have about three or four classes entirely about sports, though. I must admit, the choir [I]did[/I] got new robes... to replace their thirty-year-old ones, which I guess is a triumph. Morning announcements consisted of our amazing sports victories, but rarely anything about concerts or musicals. It's a sad state of affairs. [editline]30th January 2014[/editline] Also, did I mention that the band and choir had about a hundred trophies? They did, but you wouldn't know about them, because they were stacked on shelves at the back of one of the classrooms like firewood.

ya highschools spend way too much on sports and don't focus on preforming arts or arts in general. my school had 2 gyms, 3 baseball fields, 3 football fields, and 6 tenis courts with a golfcorse behind the school. the preforming arts has one stage, a sound system running windows xp, a couple lightboards, and a million years worth of thrift-store clothing. the music program didn't even get a new music room when they tore down the middleschool and rebuilt it (the old one had an actual hole in the ceiling in the back of the room). the only good thing is we had a really good music room acoustically anyway and a few really good pianos for the whole program. but they could just build a really really good auditorium and they would be the only school in the area to have such a facility for everybody to use, instead they built a million dollar turf-field (the browns and the father of the next QB paid for it) [editline]30th January 2014[/editline] [QUOTE=Cheshire_cat;43730874] Also, did I mention that the band and choir had about a hundred trophies? They did, but you wouldn't know about them, because they were stacked on shelves at the back of one of the classrooms like firewood.[/QUOTE] lol that happened at my school, we ran out of room to put the trophies, plus when we had to re-paint the room i discovered the ones on the shelfs were all bolted down with like 5-6 screws each

I agree with this, the working day for me is 10-15 hours so this is a good warm up for working life.

[QUOTE=Ripped Vagina;43731755]I agree with this, the working day for me is 10-15 hours so this is a good warm up for working life.[/QUOTE] 9 hours AS WELL AS shorter holidays is a little bit drastic though yeah it would set kids up for their working life. however, its not going to benefit the childs lifestyle since 9 full hours at school would drain them. and every day of the working week, with shorter holidays. is bound to piss off most parants because there child is just too tired/stressed to even go to school. theres always going to be those kids who are pushed and will be able to go in for the full 9 hours dont get me wrong. its just the majority of children are not going to appreciate this and im sure their parents wont either.

[QUOTE=Ripped Vagina;43731755]I agree with this, the working day for me is 10-15 hours so this is a good warm up for working life.[/QUOTE] Digesting all that information from learning is different to working. I do nine hour work days frequently but it's menial with not so much thinking required, just strength and stamina. I don't mind doing that, but I couldn't stand doing 9AM to 6PM days even once a week last semester at uni. After 4 hours your brain starts to shut-off, which is why I opted to go to uni for four hours a day, four days per week this semester, instead of two days, one nine hour and one seven hour each week like last semester. [editline]31st January 2014[/editline] [QUOTE=Cheshire_cat;43730874]Sports shit[/quote] I think the emphasis on sports is because schools like to be competitive, and sports is one of the easiest ways for schools to contest with each other. Schools imo need more things like a major project I did for my Industrial Tech course in senior school, all schools across the state had their students for Industrial Tech create a major project of the student's choice (as long as it was relevant to the course) with 6 months to work on it. Each major project once submitted would be marked by the state's board of studies and outstanding projects would be nominated for display in an exhibition at Sydney. My project actually got nominated (and I received a 95% combined mark for it and the 70 page folio attached with it) but sadly it didn't get approved for exhibition. It was the only project from my school to get nominated and the principal was sure to let everyone in the school know that a student had their project even considered for nomination to that exhibition. [editline]31st January 2014[/editline] [QUOTE=TestECull;43730227]remove standardized test bullshit[/quote] Standardised tests aren't bullshit. No one is the same, but the difference is not as dramatic as what people make it out to be when they post that picture of the animals and which one can climb the tree. Most students can undertake standardised tests no worries - and they are made to consider the majority of students. You will always have your extreme outliers - very poor performing students and those who are mentally disabled, but every school I ever went to offered facilities to help those students if requested - such as someone to read out the questions to the student if the student has poor eyesight, to write down the student's answer if the student has poor motor skills, even a time extension of up to half an hour in some circumstances. And on the other end, you will only ever have a small minority of students who absolutely excel in the tests. What my state's board of studies did when I still went to school (and they still do this) is scale the marks if necessary - if you got 50% in a test for two-unit Mathematics, that gets scaled up to 70% or thereabouts to reflect the difficulty of the test and show that those students are almost as knowledgeable as students who initially score at least 75% or so who only have their marks scaled up a little bit.

Studies show that employee productivity drops sharply after 5-6 hours of continuous work, this is why in practice work shifts are only 5-8 hours long with breaks. I can't imagine how 9 hour school days would work for kids, considering kids don't have the financial incentive to be productive and school is pretty taxing mentally. I've actually noticed this, after around the five or six hour mark of a shift in retail, I find my self way more likely to find excuses to avoid work for the last hour or so before I go home. I love that my manager tries to give us all five hour shifts or seven to eight hour with one hour lunch.

half of the week I have 8 school hours, its bullshit.

The longest days I had in High School were 7,5 hours, I can't fucking imagine sitting at school for 9 hours.

My school went up from 6hours a day to 8 hours when I was in year 2. The same year the school's academic prestige dropped. And it continued to drop until they pushed it down to 7hour.

[QUOTE=cr2142;43731928]9 hours AS WELL AS shorter holidays is a little bit drastic though [B]yeah it would set kids up for their working life.[/B] however, its not going to benefit the childs lifestyle since 9 full hours at school would drain them. and every day of the working week, with shorter holidays. is bound to piss off most parants because there child is just too tired/stressed to even go to school. theres always going to be those kids who are pushed and will be able to go in for the full 9 hours dont get me wrong. its just the majority of children are not going to appreciate this and im sure their parents wont either.[/QUOTE] Tbh, for me an avg highschool day was way more exhausting then most of my Working days.

Sometimes I want to get into politics just so I can scream bloody murder at the elderly untrained monkeys running our government pushing bullshit like this on national television. 2014 has not been a good year for the people of the UK with regards to shitty bills pushed through by cameron and his out of touch party of imbeciles.

[QUOTE=Janus Vesta;43724490]It doesn't work there at all. They have some of the most stressed out students you can find, a lot of kids who can't meet the unreasonable expectations just give up instead, because doing okay and doing shit may as well be the same thing.[/QUOTE] Does Japan actuality have that terrible amount of work for most students? I thought that ended awhile ago and that there are just a still a handful of schools that still do that. I never actually seen much news about it so I don't have much knowledge about it .

[QUOTE=Medevila;43724749]School year round with shorter days and longer breaks is the way to go 'summer break' is an antiquated useless tradition that does more harm than good edit: [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/Pm78MKh.png[/IMG] average age on Facepunch confirmed <18[/QUOTE] yeah i bet taking a pot shot at the ages of facepunch users really strengthens your argument