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Thursday, 1 August 1996

Against a Longer School Day ::

[There was an opinion piece in the Ithaca Journal recently, arguing in favor of an 8-hour day in public schools. This is something I wrote back. I suspect The Journal will shorten my piece if they print it (I might be late), so here it is in its entirety.]

Stuart Basefsky’s July 31 guest column in the Ithaca Journal offers a number of reasons for a longer school day.

First he points to the economic circumstances which make it difficult for parents to work and provide care for their children. But further expansion of a state institution (school) is not the only solution. Many employers are well aware of their employees’ child care issues and provide benefits such as on-site day care, flexible work hours, telecommuting, and liberal personal time and leave policies. Businesses that don’t accommodate their employees’ child care needs are going to find themselves increasingly unable to attract and retain good employees.

Mr. Basefsky goes on to state that “[c]hildren are presumably going to school ... to eventually develop skills that will allow them to function in the workplace. The discipline and attention span to work from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. must be cultivated.” The language of the second sentence is revealing. There is an implication that children are passive objects into which a faceless, beneficent state will carefully inject workplace skills—if the children would only sit still, be quiet, and do what they’re told long enough. There is more to childhood than preparing for working life. There should be more to childhood than school (just as there should be more to adulthood than work): children need time to cultivate unique individual interests that can’t be pursued in classrooms of 30, time for solitude and introspection, time to discover and learn at one’s own pace and in one’s own ways.

Extending the school day or year in effect would have parents relinquishing more of the responsibility and time required to raise their children to the state. This transference of parental responsibility (to television as well as school) is at the root of many of our societal problems. A child’s performance all the way through school might well be predicted when she’s in first or second grade; many aspects of the personality are well-formed by this time. More schooling isn’t going to make our children better individuals. Better parenting will.

Several of Mr. Basefsky’s arguments have an economic basis, but there are also strong economic arguments against a longer school day. Our tax system, by giving tax credits for child care, provides an extra incentive for both parents to work because their child care costs are subsidized—by people who don’t need to pay for child care, including parents who make sacrifices in order to spend time with their children rather than work. (This inequity could be addressed by replacing the tax credit for child care with an increased tax deduction for dependent children.)

Expanded school hours would effectively provide additional state-subsidized (and all but mandated) child care for those who desire it, at the expense of those who would rather spend the time with their own children or make other choices about how their children spend two hours of the day. Are we as a society satisfied with what we get for our school tax dollars? So satisfied that we wish to send children to school for more hours and spend more money to do so?

Mr. Basefsky makes the reader perform a bit of deduction to realize that either significantly larger classes or more teachers and therefore larger school budgets would be necessary. He suggests that there might be voluntary contributions from the economic beneficiaries of the longer school day. I am sorry to be cynical, but we tend not to pay for services that we can receive for free. This is why we generally accept taxation, to ensure that the costs of services which benefit everyone are fairly shared. If proponents of a larger public school system truly believe it is a worthwhile idea, they should be honest about the costs and convince us that we should be willing to pay them.

<< gig in corning

1996 > August

Staples Back-to-School Sale >>

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