I disagree with ideas that school schedules should shift later. I am a night owl myself, but our "natural" sleep cycle certainly more or less falls in line with school times. We have fully disrupted our circadian rhythms with our lifestyles and especially screens/lights at night. Before artificial light, our sleep/wake schedule was set by the sun.
I know we live in a different world today, but I feel like shifting our schedule because of poor sleep hygiene and bad light habits is kind of reinforcing a bad habit. Whose to say that the shift wouldn't just perpetuate itself even after a shift of 1 hour later.
It is a mischaracterization to say this is all the result of bad habits. Asking teens and young adults to perform between 6 and 9 is like asking a fully mature adult to perform between 3 and 6.
> I am a night owl myself, but our "natural" sleep cycle certainly more or less falls in line with school times.
This is absolutely not true for adolescents continuing through young adulthood. Adolescents naturally have a delay in morning alertness levels compared to fully mature adults and other children and also have sleepiness set in more slowly/later in the evening than either other group. It is not (necessarily) poor sleep hygiene which causes teens to stay up later, but their own biological processes.
> Before artificial light, our sleep/wake schedule was set by the sun.
This seems to be an argument in favor of changing times. My highschool started at 7:10. Assuming I woke up an hour before to shower, dress, and catch the bus, that means I had to wake before the sun every day of my highschool career. The only time the sun rose earlier than 6:10 was during the summer when I didn't have school.
> It is not (necessarily) poor sleep hygiene which causes teens to stay up later, but their own biological processes.
I'm genuinely curious about this, do you have links to evidence of this? You're asserting a certain causal order, but everything I've seen such as the article this thread is purely observational so doesn't say anything about the causality of it.
Abstract:
Sleep deprivation among adolescents is epidemic. We argue that this sleep deprivation is due in part to pubertal changes in the homeostatic and circadian regulation of sleep. These changes promote a delayed sleep phase that is exacerbated by evening light exposure and incompatible with aspects of modern society, notably early school start times. In this review of human and animal literature, we demonstrate that delayed sleep phase during puberty is likely a common phenomenon in mammals, not specific to human adolescents, and we provide insight into the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon.
I seem to recall a recent paper about hunter-gatherer watchkeeping; that certain age groups would be more alert at certain times. That one paper wasn't all that convincing, but it's an interesting idea.
We used to shift our schedule pretty much daily. Outside of the equator, the night shifts pretty majorly throughout the year. And at the equator, the sun is deadly during the day. Such that our ancestors probably slept as often during the day as the did some nights.
Not to say we shouldn't work on sleep hygiene, but the myth that it is a modern crisis is misguided. Used to, people blamed caffeine. Just look for numbers to see how much more coffee used to be consumed.
All of that said, much of the difficulties in education for kids are also explainable by our bar just being higher. Much higher. But, I'd rather our methods improve. Not lowering our expectations.
Do you have any evidence to support those claims, specifically that night owl's "natural" sleep cycle falls in line with school times? There is substantial biological evidence that phenotypes for night owls vs. morning larks do actually exist. Are you suggesting it is "natural" for a night owl to be focused at 8am, which is around the average start time for the earliest classes in our education system?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the study itself didn't look near this rigorous. It looks like they made 3 buckets and tried to correlate them with performance. How can you do that and they say "aha! look! circadian rhythms"?
How do we know that the students who stayed up late aren't also the students that procrastinate and do all their work last minute, and thus recieve lower grades?
That seems like just as reasonable a conclusion to draw.
No, changes in circadian rhythm with age are fairly constant across human societies, though we westerners do have our additional pathologies. Teenage bushmen tend to stay up later than their parents just like teenage westerners do. Making teenagers wake up earlier than younger children is just a bad idea.
It is about meeting in the middle. I had a job when I had to be in office at 9 and it was just a nightmare, because to get on time I had to wake up early and only able to sleep 5 hours. Another job was more flexible and I was able to get in at 10. That meant over 6 hours of sleep for me. Imagine the difference between sleeping 5 hours every night or 6-7. This is a huge difference, by shifting things later by an hour. It wouldn't make a difference for morning person.
Like many I was certainly a night owl in college. But this idea that it’s impossible for students to change their sleep schedules seems... odd. By that logic no one could ever move across time zones. College students in particular tend to like to stay up late for social and other reasons. But that’s different from being unable to get up earlier. It also isn’t only classes that are early but some athletics as well.
I know we live in a different world today, but I feel like shifting our schedule because of poor sleep hygiene and bad light habits is kind of reinforcing a bad habit. Whose to say that the shift wouldn't just perpetuate itself even after a shift of 1 hour later.