Five States Will Begin Longer School Days For Some Students Next September

The Boston Globe, Fox News.com, and SFGate report Federal and state officials announced Monday that select schools in Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts,  New York, and Tennessee will begin implementing longer school days for some students next September, to provide extra academic traction and enrichment for thousands of children. 

Making for a possibly more reliable baby-sitting service in the afternoons? Though the stated attempt of the plan is to provide more hands-on attention. Mighten the nation just put up all the kids for the night, as God knows they're susceptible to so many negative influences away from school, or is it at school that they come under the influence of so many fellow improperly prepared kids?

Federal, state and district funds will cover costs, with help from The Ford Foundation and The National Center on Time and Learning. No doubt longer school days to achieve better overall education numbers has the best of intentions besides political job protection. After all, it's always been so that parents with more resources have not lacked for available methods of ensuring their children are sufficiently educated. But since it's numbers that are still the reasoning behind this step to dominate children's time, eventually students who need extra help will get less attention than the students who produce better numbers. How schools have always functioned. 

If the intent is really to improve students, a better system would result in parents taught better at being parents. The fact is those students who start school with a better awareness of learning's building blocks, thinking and reading, usually come through the system educated no matter how unruly educators find them to control. Most probably it's just politically infeasible to blame the parents who are at fault when their children start school behind. 

It's the new parents who should be provided an evening class, taught at their children's eventual local school, to learn how to focus and emphasize their child's minds becoming properly trained to learn which is no more than the basic curiosity we're all born with that needs to be nurtured long before they ever enter school. No, not more years of kindergarten. Those are the children's first times interacting socially with each other, that shouldn't be reconfigured solely for the purpose of pretending adults are the only proper teachers when all teaching is the result of learning for yourself. 

Yes, children who are behind in need of more education could use more attention. But longer hours seems, at some point, to only satisfy adults need to lay blame somewhere else, when if a child cares, they will see to it they get the job done themselves by paying attention. Which may not necessarily result from schools turning into full-time gulags. But it's easier punishing children than parents.  

So, to conclude my tirade, in words I hoped to express as eloquently, is the following comment from Cos Again on the CBS Radio News, New York website. 

"Far be it from me to not acquiesce to more school time... However, I've noticed that children (as of late) are showing more and more signs of stress, hypertension and lack of interest. At first, I thought it might be a result of the 'video game' industry... I then begin to do some research about schools today and found that their anxieties are more prevalent today than 30 years ago. I remember being a child - I was a child... Kindergarten was play time. Now, I send my daughter to kindergarten and she has homework...! I couldn't believe it. Children no longer have the opportunity to be a child. This is why the world is so messed up... This is why young adults today are incapable of dealing with their emotions. This is also why adolescents are more misunderstood today then ever before. And here we have the aforementioned states demanding more from them...!? We are going to have a major mess on our hands if this isn't stopped, and I mean soon."

Well, I don't know about stopping the program as some of the plan is directed at offering more attention to after-school band activities and the like, but when much of the policy concerned with the controlling of the kids has been devised by adults who have hidden from accepting their proper blame, I can only be disappointed in the well educated who should know better how they did well in school. Which was from their parents' dedication and not that bug-a-boo of conservatism the nanny state. 

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Slate coverage of the announcement, News Corp. To Shutter Tablet Newspaper The Daily, quoted Rupert Murdoch's statement from Business Insider. "From its launch, The Daily was a bold experiment in digital publishing and an amazing vehicle for innovation. Unfortunately, our experience was that we could not find a large enough audience quickly enough to convince us the business model was sustainable in the long-term.

Soapbox View's business model has no intention of folding as quick. - CMF