> Changing the operating hours of an institution so central to the community is far from easy. It requires strong leadership and adjustments by school bus companies and businesses offering services like child care and extracurricular clubs. Here's the elephant in the room. High schools start and end earlier with the idea that older kids can watch their siblings. I'd say a lack of public commitment to child care is al…
That's an interesting postulation, but is it born out by societies where most families have a single child?
What were the child care options like at the time that the current school hours were developed (I'm guessing this is close to a century ago).
Do all relatively-civilised societies have the same attitude towards school hours and public commitment to child care?
If not, then trying to identify some correlations would be informative.
My gut feel is it's entirely unrelated to older siblings looking after younger ones -- partly because if both are at school at the same time, that problem is already solved.
I suspect the root cause is probably something more simple -- at the time school hours were decided, schools / education departments looked to how it was done elsewhere, be it neighbouring schools / states, or failing that, simply aligning the hours with what was commonly regarded as a 'good honest day's work'.
Clearly this would all have been a long time before anyone knew about, let alone considered, age-specific circadian rhythm variations.
Jesus, we know more than enough about it now -- the damage lack of sleep does to adults, and its profound importance through development especially in the teenage years -- and yet it'll be at least a decade before even the more progressive western societies shift teenage school hours forward by a few hours.