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Boston Elementary, Middle Schools To Get a Longer Day
Many public elementary- and middle-school students in Boston may soon have a longer time to spend in school each day. A change, announced Friday by Boston mayor Martin J. Walsh, though yet to get final approval from the city's school committee and teachers' unions' full membership, would add 40 minutes to the schedule at schools not already under an extended schedule. Currently, most elementary school students have a 6-hour day, and middle school students' is 10 minutes longer, which means that high schools will now have by default the shortest day (six and a half hours) in the Boston public school system. From the Boston Globe's coverage:
Teachers in the 60 schools would get an annual stipend of $4,464 for the expanded schedule, the mayor’s office said. The plan would be rolled out over three years, beginning with about 20 schools in the 2015-2016 school year, the statement said. Officials said it wasn’t clear which schools would be in the first group. Once fully rolled out, the plan, which would add up to about an extra month of learning per year for 23,000 students, would cost about $12.5 million per year.
How long is the school day in your neck of the woods, and do you think it should be any longer?
This all makes sense and is probably a good idea.
That said, despite school having literally been decades ago, I find myself empathizing with the kids on this one, who I'm sure arn't seeing this as an investment in their future but rather yet more time spent in the dungeon. I didn't exactly hate school growing up, but damn if I wasn't ready to get the hell outa there when the bell rang.
Maybe it's because we just had Christmas and that always puts me in a nostalgic child like mood. I'm sure if they announced this in September when school is just getting back into session and screwing up my morning commute I'd say to hell with the kids, but for now, the kid in me say: BOOOO!
No need for school to start at the absolute butt-crack of dawn. It's actually been shown to be harmful for teenagers. Their natural sleep cycle involves sleeping in. Many of them simply physically cannot function so early in the morning. (Thinking is a physical process...)
If high school started an hour later, the kids would be on the streets less while parents are off work, too. So it seems like a win-win, without actually increasing the number of hours of instruction.
Increasing the duration of school won't automatically improve education. "No Child Left Behind" certainly didn't, but it did require greater duration to the school day if you actually met all of its requirements.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Where I live, the elementary schools are roughly 8am-335 pm. They vary by 10 minutes earlier or later to accommodate the bus schedule. The elementary schools also get out at 1pm every Wednesday. The junior high is 805am-328pm and the high school is 8am-325pm. I used to work at the junior high and it seemed it wasn't long enough. For instance, lunch at the junior high had shove three grades of kids through in less than an hour. After standing in line, kids were lucky if they got 10 minutes to eat lunch.
Where I grew up my high school schedule was 710am-220pm. I actually liked that schedule. If you didn't play a sport, you could still get home and complete homework and still have part of the afternoon and evening to hang out or do whatever you liked. If you did play a sport, you had about an hour and a half to finish homework before practice and two and a half hours to finish before a game.
The kids in my local school district always complain they can't do their homework until they get home and are often up until midnight finishing hit. While studies have shown that teenagers' circadian rhythms are different from adults and going to school early is harmful to them, it didn't bother me personally.
If we were to have them start much later, we also would have to change adult worktimes. For example, I grew up a 90 minute train ride into NYC. If the schools in my town didn't start early, then there would be many parents who were late for work each day. My district made those changes to take that into account. After school programs are easy to get grants for. Before school programs? Not so much.
I'm in Orange County California.
For grades 1 – 5
7:45 AM – 2:05 PM (M, Tu, Th, F)
7:45 AM – 12:50 PM (Wed)
That short Wednesday is baffling. On the longer days mom and dad can maybe stagger their schedule so they can handle it if they've got flexible employers, but that 5-hour day just looks like a gift to the local after-school care programs.
Textbooks and Open Educational Resources
It is ludicrous to make the assertion that adding 40 minutes of time to the school day will magically add a month more of learning. The mentally that more time in school equals more learning is very flawed. We have setup our school like little prisons with strict rules and rigid schedules. Real learning doesn't take place while students are sitting at their desk listening to a teacher droning on an on. Real learning takes place when kids are actively engaged. They should invest their money on creating an alternative, project based educational program.
High school will have the shortest day after this change takes effect.
Textbooks and Open Educational Resources
Go back to high school! You obviously fail at basic algebra!!!
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
are less than this already, on average.
this discrepancy can only grow.
Meh, quality is what it is about, not quantity - the school I went to had a 9am to 4pm school day and was doing well in rankings, but they decided to do a fairly major restructuring of the school day in order to shift more lessons before lunch (they had a research project for a year prior, which showed the two lessons after lunch had a much lower engagement level than lessons before lunch). By starting 20 minutes earlier (8.40 start) and cutting 20 minutes off of the hour lunch, they managed to have four lessons before lunch, one after, and actually managed to shave an hour off the school day, meaning we got to finish at 3pm. Even the kids loved it, and the study done after showed a massive uptick in engagement in both the single lesson after lunch, and the one that had been moved to before lunch. The school is now topping rankings in the area as well.
People get less productive as the day gets longer, especially students. I think there would be far more benefit to extending the school year and abandoning summer holidays than there would be to extending the school day.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Keep the kids longer and don't send homework.
For many children, success in school depend on 1-on-1 help with homework. In many households, parents are not able to provide that help due to work schedule or their own lack of education. Depending on homework seems to disproportionally affect children living in poor, uneducated households. Those children grow up less educated and end up with a lower paying job, so when they have children of their own, the cycle continues.
A great example of this is the very debate over "the core curriculum". The debate's loudest voices are from parents that just don't understand what the new methods are trying to accomplish. The parents all agree their child should be taught math, so the debate should be between educators on *how* to do it. I guarantee you that there would be next to no debate if parents were not asked to help with homework. If we limit what we teach to what all parents understand, then we're done. Turn the lights off and crawl back into our caves.
... of our agrarian past.
It was there so children could help their parents on their farms. This was at a time when between 60 to 80 percent of the labor force was involved in some kind of agriculture.
Since none of this is applicable and the students are generally agreed to be in need of more education... the conclusion seems rather obvious.
The teachers won't like this being the lazy union shit heads that they've become in many cases. And politically the issue will get attacked although perhaps subtly. But it is for the common good.
Que the flames for suggesting that teachers unions do not always have the best interests of the students at heart or are in fact always reasonable. A warning to anyone that does want to make such an argument... I will bury your ass alive in facts.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
While i may not be familiar with the American high school system where i went to school (the UK) school ran from 08:45 to 3:15 and to most able students 50% of that was totally pointless. I would find myself, and many of my friends covering the material and the assigned homework within the 1st 30 minutes of a 60 minute lesson. However i can see how this might be beneficial to those less able.
Luckily at a post-16 level my school had a more university like attitude and we actually went down to 2.5 hours of teaching per day, with the rest being self study. Strangely enough when i was then less constrained my grades went up significantly in the subjects i had chosen to study.
The only upside to this i can see is that parents will be able to work for longer - in which case then they may aswell go the whole way and have a 10 hour day with many hours of rec time
The difference in focus was apparent as soon as you walked into the building. The school in New York had posters for good colleges and educational awards on prominent display and had very little focus on sports. Despite this, they had a much better PE program -- they had an Olympic-sized swimming pool and offered elective options for cross-country skiing and archery, among other things.
The schools I attended in the South had larger, longer classes and were entirely focused on football. If your aptitude didn't fall into the range of something to do with football, they pretty much just wanted to waste your time until they could kick you out into the real world with a promising career as a gas station attendant to look forward to. You were either a future football player or a future football viewer. That's all they knew how to do.
What no one in any school ever told me was that I was the captain of my own fate. We all are. So if your school is bad and you don't want to grow up to be a gas station attendant, you'd better find some other way to learn the math and science that today's careers demand. The world isn't going to get any easier.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Increasing hours is rather less important than increasing the prestige of teaching as a profession (note: this does not and should not mean paying more to teachers). The total time in instruction is in the OECD 2012 report [PDF], at chart D1.1, while the rough breakdown into subjects is in charts D1.2a, D1.2b, and D1.2c for different age groups.
In summary, Finns spend among the lowest formal instruction times in the OECD. For example, 9-11 year olds in Finland spend 640 hours per year at school lessons, while the average in the OECD for that age group is 821 hours. The hours for the USA are not indicated, as there is a good deal of variation among the states, but only 8 of them require less than 800 hours per pupil per year (some insanely require more than 1000).
You may also like to read this.
Public education is a farce. A kid sitting by himself in front of a computer with an internet connection for an hour a day and with zero direction is likely to learn far more than in an entire day spent in most public schools. Any encouragement or direction that the parent(s) can muster is icing.
Yes, my same rant and yes I realize school is largely day care for older kids. Good, got that out of the way. So I look at this the same way I look at hours at a job. You can't get more than 40 hours a week of physical labor and you probably get far less than that with knowledge based labor.(Yes, that means overtime is actually pointless.) I wonder how many hours of school they should shoot for to maximize learning, my guess is it's probably less than 6 hours and most likely more time won't result in more learning. (I suppose they could be ridiculous like the president of a local university who expect 10 hours a day out of students. This was of course based off of nothing and was probably counter productive.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I work in a school but am not part of the teacher's union. Teachers, and their unions, are like doctors, lawyers, hackers, and all other walks of life--some are good, some are bad, but most are somewhere in between. In the end, though, they want to get paid like anyone else. Teachers get summers off, all student breaks, snow days, and some personal time. When I read the article and see they'll be getting an extra 4k a year I can't help but cringe. Is this really about what's best for the kids, or is it the teacher's union getting a bit more money for the teachers? Again, I'm not part of that union, so maybe I'm just a spiteful jerk who has to be at work while teachers are enjoying summer break and whining about not making enough.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I'm certified to teach K-5 in one of the US states but currently teach in another country. I've looked into this idea quite a bit.
There is evidence to show that extra school time benefits children in families that don't give much academic support at home (especially prevalent in poor, inner-city neighborhoods). For example, standardized test scores in reading often rise after summer vacations in affluent areas, but not so much in poor areas. The assumption is that many affluent parents tend to read and encourage their children to read during the summer. It's simply a disparity of time reading. To combat this, some experimental, inner-city schools have had success raising scores with very long days. However, I haven't seen anything showing that longer days help elsewhere. Homework (no matter how many hours) has been shown to have no significant effect raising scores for elementary students. (Up to 2 hours helps high school students, but over that seems to give no additional benefit.)
Honestly, I would first look at reducing time giving children tests. In many schools, children are given about an hour of tests a day, on average (amount varying from day to day, class to class, school to school). Tests are specifically to help adults (administrators, teachers, parents). Children are not allowed to practice their weak areas (the main thing that helps them learn) during a test. Although tests give children goals to strive for, motivational goals can be given many other, more effective ways. That's often 180 hours of test time a year (36 days of school, considering 5 hours a day of "in-class" time).
In my school we give 1 standardized test a year, and no testing outside that. Our scores are usually average or better than average on the standardized test (despite having many special-needs students). The teachers have more time to work with the students (and therefore know exactly where each child is). We also have more time to plan (instead of correcting tests during prep time).
Common questions we get are about how we communicate a child's level, without grades (given from tests). Simply put, we give more in-depth reports to parents & other schools. It works, but this is the part that scares most administrators and parents. Frankly, this part is more work for the adults. But if the main focus is on what's best for the children, frequent testing should be abolished. From the perspective of a child's education (practicing difficulties and learning new things), testing is one of the least efficient uses of time. And if we truly want more class time, that's where educators should start.
These new school hours are awful. The high school youth need a far longer school day. Programs and services for students have been cut supposedly for economic reasons. They cut the hours as they cut the programs. Students have no worse enemy than their families and neighbors. Getting high school kids absent from their homes is a positive goal. My high school day consisted of getting up at 6am and eating, driving 15 miles to school and being in place at 7:20 am.. The day ended at 3:20 pm. but was far from over. One night a week we had concert band practice or marching band practice from 7 PM unril 10 pm. We also had either a marching event or a concert event about one night a week and sometimes traveled for a weekend for regional contests and the like. Band students tended to go to college and had grades and health reports superior to the school population. That is despite the fact that many of us would be forced to study all night and be on our feet for two days running at times. Musical training and phys-ed are both vital programs that every student should be involved in. And guess what programs got cut the most!
It was tried on me. It failed. Back then I learned a valuable lesson: You cannot force me to work. You can motivate me and you can give me a reason to do it, but you can't MAKE me.
Never worked. Never will. You can of course make me show up and make me physically present. And if I feel generous, I won't disturb you with snoring while you try to teach.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Boston is one of the highest cost of housing areas in the country. I had a tiny one room studio overlooking a back alley back in 1998 that cost $1300 per month (Compare that with 925 per month for a two bedroom apartment here in Portland, Oregon)
Most Respectfully Yours Mark Allyn Bellingham, Washington
It's all very simple and historically related to school bus utilization.
High school sports have practice in the afternoon, so all the "classwork" must be done before then.
In order to get the legal minimum number of contact minutes in, high school must start early in the morning, particularly so that in today's "take 7 AP classes/year" model, the student-athlete can still take a full load (on top of their sports being a PE elective).
Now you have to get to the elementary and middle schools. Elementary schools start next after high school, because parents want their kid out early in the afternoon for enrichment activities: dance lessons, Girl/Boy scouting, etc., and stay at home parents want their morning reasonably free.
Middle school starts latest, because everyone thinks there's no hope for 6,7,8th graders going through puberty with raging hormones, so who cares what schedule they are on.
If the goal is improving grades (which it seems to be from TFA), then you have to get the kids interested; they'll learn far more if they aren't just being lectured at. The best way to get them interested is to let them direct at least some of their own education. It's been shown that kids (or people in general, for that matter) take a larger interest/initiative when given freedom and personal control. Let them define something they want to learn about in an applied way, then connect it to regular core classes, and use the extra time for that. Assign a teacher to be an "adviser" (or make positions that are only advisers) to define explicit goals, track overall progress, and put them in touch with the specific teachers for education when needed.
Maybe they want to learn about becoming a race car driver, so you have: automotive, business management (for sponsoring and finances), physics (aerodynamics, G-forces), materials (composition of the tires, body, etc.), and phys ed (reaction time and physical fitness are important in drivers). End goal: design a race car, perhaps some job shadowing of an actual driver.
Maybe they want to make video games, so you get: applied math (vectors, other calculations), physics (gravity and object interaction) computer science (programming), art (character and world design), psychology (play testing and feedback), business management (marketing and selling the game, if desired), and liberal arts (plot creation). End goal: create a simple-but-complete game.
(Of course, all of this is more important in High School, and this extended day won't affect high schools in the area.)
You're correct about Adderall, they've had data on that going back to the '70s that it causes Parkinson's disease.
Adderall is just a mixture of right handed and left handed molecules of Dexedrine, but Adderall can also cause seizures Dexedrine doesn't.
Ritalin though, is perfectly safe when taken in therapeutic doses for most children with ADHD.
Nasty stuff that Ritalin. I took it right into depression, messes with the mind.
MDs are wacko prescribing PEP PILLS to kids. And adults! Neuro-enhancers these are not! They are drugs. And drugs are bad. Mkay?
"My kid isn't doing well in school", is all that needs to be said and they are on Ritalin. Ritalin is a catch all and being over prescribed by a factor I can only guess at.
Teachers will get $4,464 for 40 more minutes? What the hell are they making now???
If you exercise plenty every day and keep your brain focused on something productive all day, you can kind of sort of fight the depression. But yes there are better alternatives.
Don't fall into the trap of "tracking".. "I am of the elite and I shall study the philosophers and sciences. You, on the other hand, do not have my intellectual capacity, and shall be trained to be a blue collar factory worker and get your hands dirty".
THIS! I have always engaged the "elite" And if they get too high up on their high horse, I bring them down a few pegs.
For in fact, a very intelligent person who knows how to get their hands dirty is vastly superior to a person who merely thinks. A person can be a Nobel Laureate, yet if his car blows a fuse in the desert, he'll die just like anyone else who doesn't know how to fix it.
A few examples:
Years ago, my neighbor, who is an intellectual with whom I've had a lot of interesting conversations, had a car that was continually breaking down, not big things, but I used to help him repair it. That usually consisted of me doing th ework while he listened. One day I was repairing a window that had fallen out of it's track. I was explaining to him how it works and how ot repair it whne he interrupted "To tell the truth, I don't want to know about how to repair cars. Last time I helped him.
Much more recently, there was a woman on the Toyota RV's SIG list who was constantly having issues, mostly electrical, with her toyhome. At one point, I chimed in with a helpful link that would help her understand a little more about electricity. Considering these are ancient beasts, it helps to understand how to at least field repair one. Or to not be taken advantage of by an unscrupulous mechanic.
She quickly answered back to the group and me that She had no intention of learning about these things, that she expected to ask questions and have us answer them for her, because she was an artist, not a technician.
For some reason, her questions were not answered any more.
If she had thought about it, she could have thanked me kindly and ignored the basic electrical stuff. Instead, she had to show her intellectual creds and superiority by announcing she was too good to learn that stuff - she was an artist for christ's sake! It's not that I'm saying everyone can or should be getting their hands dirty. But knowledge is seldom a bad thing.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Individuals are ... individual. Some people can and should be introduced to mathematics quite early. Math is the foundation of science and engineering, and one effective method for crippling a nation's technological future is withholding math from the young.
I would argue that there is no "too young" to promote numerical understanding for anyone. Understanding numbers is essential to understanding the world, and the sooner that understanding starts, the better.
Piaget responded to criticism by acknowledging that the vast majority of critics did not understand the outcomes he wished to obtain from his research (wikipedia). If that doesn't indicate a "the facts be damned" sort of dishonesty, I don't know what does.
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Tracking need not consist of excluding smart people from shop classes. My Jr. High School had 9 different levels in each grade, the primary difference being the difficulty and speed of the academic courses (math, English, science, history). Failure to track means boring and hindering the smart kids, and frustrating the dummies who can't understand what the teaching is rambling on about.
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Very little useful learning goes on in school. And the top students need time outside of school to visit libraries, pursue intellectual hobbies, do independent reading, and generally do all the academic stuff that will actually matter in their lives later on (and matter to society later on).
By continually extending the school day and the school year, we increasingly ensure that we lock our best and brightest into mediocrity by tying up all of their time in institutionally managed busywork designed to ensure they don't deviate from the mean, which is pretty piss-poor.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I have always engaged the "elite" And if they get too high up on their high horse, I bring them down a few pegs.
For in fact, a very intelligent person who knows how to get their hands dirty is vastly superior to a person who merely thinks. A person can be a Nobel Laureate, yet if his car blows a fuse in the desert, he'll die just like anyone else who doesn't know how to fix it.
You seem to have quite an ego issue. Do you know how to grow all of the food in your diet? Do you know how to make your own penicillin? Could you perform a root canal on yourself or even a loved one? Even if you can do all of those things, I'm sure there are plenty of other skills you lack. Criticizing a Nobel Laureate, who have all probably done more in their lives than you ever will, just because s/he cannot fix their own car is asinine.
I am a software engineer, and have no delusions that my skills are somehow "better" than that of a car mechanic. But learning how to service my own car (other than the basics like changing my own oil) is a waste of my time. I can either be doing work or learning new skills in my area of expertise, which provides far more benefit to both myself and society as a whole. I also pay maids to clean my home each week and a service to do my yard work each week during the warm months. I do not believe myself to be a more superior human being than my maids, but my time is certainly more valuable from an economic standpoint.
I also share your disdain for intellectuals that think they are superior to others, but I hold the same contempt for blue collar guys who think their handyman skills somehow make themselves superior to those who do not share them. Separation of labor is an important thing, and for most people who earn enough to easily pay a mechanic, learning how to repair the windows of their own car is as valuable as knowing how to churn their own butter.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
I have always engaged the "elite" And if they get too high up on their high horse, I bring them down a few pegs.
For in fact, a very intelligent person who knows how to get their hands dirty is vastly superior to a person who merely thinks. A person can be a Nobel Laureate, yet if his car blows a fuse in the desert, he'll die just like anyone else who doesn't know how to fix it.
You seem to have quite an ego issue.
Perhaps. It is up to others to decide if it is earned or unearned.
Do you know how to grow all of the food in your diet? Do you know how to make your own penicillin? Could you perform a root canal on yourself or even a loved one? Even if you can do all of those things, I'm sure there are plenty of other skills you lack.
Non sequitar. I cannot do everything of course, and that isn't even relevant to my point. side note, I do know how to garden, and as a hobby, I often make my own cured meats. It's enjoyable, and oddly relaxing.
Criticizing a Nobel Laureate, who have all probably done more in their lives than you ever will, just because s/he cannot fix their own car is asinine.
Dear sir, you are getting your stories mixed up, not to mention you might want to go back to read what I wrote. It was not that she didn't know. The issue I took with her attitude was that she did not want to learn some basic electrical knowledge, presented in good faith in an effort to help her. Then expressed her superiority. That's pretty appalling (to me), as well as graceless and very rude.
And she was an artist, not a Nobel Laureate.
I am a software engineer, and have no delusions that my skills are somehow "better" than that of a car mechanic. But learning how to service my own car (other than the basics like changing my own oil) is a waste of my time.
There is a major difference between you and I. I have never ever found gaining knowledge of anything to be a waste of my time.
And it has been years since I chenged my oil, if you are thinking of that as an example. I have rebuilt engines as a lark on occasion.
I can either be doing work or learning new skills in my area of expertise, which provides far more benefit to both myself and society as a whole. I also pay maids to clean my home each week and a service to do my yard work each week during the warm months.
Which knowledge is of no use to yourself or society as a whole? I think we might be at a sort of impasse here, because I gobble up knowledge voraciously, and am very curious about almost everything. Perhaps that is a bad thing? I have what I do to make a living, and am quite good at it, but I fear that limiting myself to that would be, well, very limiting.
I do not believe myself to be a more superior human being than my maids, but my time is certainly more valuable from an economic standpoint.
Heavens, this isn't even my argument. My time was/is quite valuable also, and one of my biggest abilities was to interface effectively with either the maintenance people or the important visiting politician or CEO or University president or whoever. I can tell you, that is a talent that apparently few have. I ended up in computer support for the "stars" just because of that. The people who would normally do that had great difficulty dealing with people "way above their station". Their outlook, not mine. I walked in, and calmly fixed the problem And that support wasn't in my job description, it was just something I picked up by being curious about computers. Admittidely I have worked intensively with computers since the mainframe only days. But it was an example of non job description knowledge.
No one I know of thinks of me as an ego case. I regularly was commended for the ability to work well with difficult people. Some of them even appreciated a little reminder that they were just human also. Some didn't of course, bu
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
First off, my last post was responding to only the parts of your post I quoted. The two anecdotes you originally mentioned were clearly about people who were being jerks (although we only have one side of each story). I don't condone the way they reacted to you and others that were helping them. I mostly only had an issue with:
For in fact, a very intelligent person who knows how to get their hands dirty is vastly superior to a person who merely thinks.
A person can be a Nobel Laureate, yet if his car blows a fuse in the desert, he'll die just like anyone else who doesn't know how to fix it.
The first statement clearly shows you saying that an intelligent person with blue collar skills is vastly superior to someone with more cerebral skills. Most of my response was arguing against this point. You didn't just say those with hands-on skills were just as valuable, you said they were vastly superior. It was a very egotistical statement. No less egotistical than if I said my ability to write software is vastly superior to a mechanic's ability to fix my car.
Dear sir, you are getting your stories mixed up, not to mention you might want to go back to read what I wrote. [...] And she was an artist, not a Nobel Laureate.
As I said above, I was not referring to your anecdote about the artist. I was only referring to your comments about Nobel Laureates that cannot change their own spark plugs (and don't carry spares while traveling in the desert). I read and understood your post just fine.
There is a major difference between you and I. I have never ever found gaining knowledge of anything to be a waste of my time.
It lacks a lot of imagination to believe gaining knowledge is never a waste of time. Would learning all the cheat codes for all original Nintendo games be a good use of your time? What about if you don't even like video games? If you can understand why that would be a waste of time, you should also be able to see why learning how to rebuild an engine is also a waste of time for someone who hates that type of work. Even if I knew how to do it I would still pay someone else to do it (and simply getting a second or third opinion is more than good enough to stop a mechanic from swindling me).
I am not arguing that learning is a bad thing. My wife's two main complaints about me are that I don't like to clean and that I spend far too much money on books from Amazon. My reading in high school and my 20's was very generalist. But in my 30's it has almost all been targeted at my career. This is still a wide range of topics from Javascript to statistics to business process optimization to concurrency models. But I rarely spend much time reading about economics or history or sociology anymore.
I don't find those topics unimportant now. I just find others more important and I believe they teach me skills that make me more valuable. I don't think my route is more superior than yours, but I resent your implication that your route is superior to mine. I hate working with my hands, other than some hobbyist electronics / robotics work, but I don't think that has any negative impact on my worth. I still think outside of the box just fine and have a very wide range of skills.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
More is not always better. A long school day only makes sense if the more contains a quality product. Not just in Boston, but in other districts as well school curricula are littered with useless stuff like assemblies, citizenship classes, and plenty of other dumb and useless stuff. How come that in other countries or in home schools students spend way less time in school yet are getting better grades and progress faster through course work? If US schools would reduce waste and increase quality of teachers, curricula, and the overall system (mainly having teachers teach the same kids over several school years) they could cut school time by 40 minutes each day and still get better results and spend less money.