Schooling: Random Thoughts

As host parents to a foreign exchange student this year, my wife and I are being exposed to an aspect of American life we had thought was solidly in our rearviews. Seeing it again through a new lens, I have some thoughts about schooling and high school life here in the States, likely worth all of the three weeks of experience from which they were gleaned:

Confirmed! High school still sucks! Cripes these kids get no time to themselves and all the stress: Get to school before eight, play sports until after the dinner hour, eat quick, do hours or homework, try to get enough sleep to do it all the next day, all while navigating the tenuous and beguiling social mores of teenagehood in the digital age.
Remind me why we have short classes and really long days and three months off in a post-agrarian society? Why do we, as a people, find a solution and never move away from it, despit changing circumstances. Surely there a better, more apt and humane approaches. Off the top of my head, maybe shorter days; longer class periods; shorter, more frequent breaks, instead of infrequent long ones. And sports that are kept local and don’t require hundreds of miles of travel and countless hours of time and incongruous expectations. What is our goal here? To crush kids into a form or help them learn and excel?
Learning math at forty is so much more fun than at sixteen. Helping with homework as a parent can be hard and tiring, but it’s also stimulating in a more creative-than-I remember way. Perhaps because you get to learn without having any of the consequences of being obligated to do so.
As glad as I am to not be in school any longer, I wonder if these same critiques couldn’t also be levelled as most careers, where the outcomes we supposedly aspire to aren’t actually aimed at.