Back in November I wrote “Touring the Mediocrity Factory” regarding a conversation with an American primary school principal. She dismissed as unworkable the Russian system in which schools are purely academic institutions and have a short school day. It seems that Israel operates schools with a similar schedule and mission, at least for the first six grades. Children go to school from about 8 am to 12:30 pm. They are not served lunch at “school”. They do not have recess. They do not play sports at “school”. Although generally the cost of most things in Israel is higher than in the U.S., Israel spends less than the U.S. on primary schools (just under $6,000 per year says the OECD; compare to about $11,200 per year for the U.S.)
Note that at least some Israelis are unhappy with the current system. I was told that feminists in particular complain that the system is unfair to women because, if a family cannot afford after-school programs, mothers are typically the ones who have to care for children who are dumped onto the street at 12:30 pm.
in the 1990s when we were living in Europe, the Swiss & the French were slowly (canton by canton in the case of Switzerland) abandoning the practice of having the children go home for lunch, and then return to school from 1:30 until 4:30 pm since it was untenable for dual-career couples (many of them had hired nannies to cope with the mid-day meal for the children or relied on grandparents). School still ends early on Wednesdays in many areas, but for a more rigorous physical education afternoon (to include skiing in the Jura mountains near Geneva when we lived there), fully supervised, with modest fees (compared to skiing in the US anyway), and no fees for tennis, football (soccer), etc., in the spring/fall. And that is not because there isn’t PE on other days; on the contrary, they have 3 recesses per day so far more physical exercise than a public school in the US. I had no idea Israeli school days are so short. Finland gets coverage for not starting formal education until age 7, which is about the time boys in particular can tolerate extended seat work.
Oh, Phil!!
We here in the U.S. couldn’t even consider such a thing. How could we let all those starving children go home without their free lunch? There’d be kids dropping like flies.
Kids in the US live a very different lifestyle than most kids outside of the US. Even poor kids here have it better than most. I use to teach in RI and I would guess about 30% of the students had free breakfast and half off lunch. Liberals could never see that happen but it’s also the reason this country is trillions of dollars in debt. We pay for so many things that we really shouldn’t pay for. Millions of dollars is spend on food stamps and disability to people just abusing the system. Many of these people can work they just choose not to. I know people that are collecting full pensions but somehow they collect a disability check on top of it. I’m not sure how this is possible but it’s happening all over the country. Someone needs to really take a good look at what our government is spending money on and fix it because it really is a complete mess.
There are plenty of Americas who think of school primarily as publicly-funded daycare rather than as a educational institution.