I think it's mostly the teachers and the administrators who advocate for the earlier times. Well, that and parents who drop off their kids before work. A later start would be great for students.
Work schedules would have to change. Schools are basically a child care service with varying qualities of value-add education thrown in. Maybe after a year of WFH being normalized, companies will be more accepting of flexible schedules.
I used to tutor at a Boys & Girls Club in a very low-income area in Massachusetts. The way they assign students to schools is weird (at least to me, I didn’t grow up here). Students need to apply, even to public schools, and they’re offered spots through some combination of lottery, location, and grades/test scores. One of the girls I tutored went to a school that was pretty far away from her home - something like a 90 minute bus ride thanks to traffic. When I asked her about how she ended up at a school so far away she casually explained that her parents had to be at work early so she had to go to a school where she’d get on the bus as early as possible. It broke my heart.
I had a 70-80 minute bus ride every day for 7 years, while pretty annoying, I wouldn't call it "heart-breaking". You did homework, read books, listened to music, etc. It was just a thing you did.
Sure, and I’m glad that worked out for you! But for the population at large, lots of research suggests that early wake up times are detrimental to student outcomes as a population.
Work schedules would not need to change if one salary would be all you need to support a family. This world we've raised for ourselves was underpinned by a primary wage earner, and a primary homemaker. We even used to subsidize homemaking. We've gone backwards all in the name of progress.
Alternatively, let both parents work, have careers, and be theoretically capable of supporting themselves independently, and also reduce the minimum number of hours people are expected to work in a week in order for it to count as a "real" job, so that both parents are also able to spend adequate time with their families.
I'd like to see some change, but I'm not sure that just going back to some version of how it was done when my generation was young necessarily counts as progress.
Dual-income households were always a thing, even in the most gender-restrictive days of the 1950s. The idea that one male breadwinner would provide for a whole household was always an upper-middle-class fantasy.
> Dual-income households were always a thing, even in the most gender-restrictive days of the 1950s. The idea that one male breadwinner would provide for a whole household was always an upper-middle-class fantasy.
Source? because this isn't my partner's experience. Her grand parents owned a house, cars and raised more than 5 kids on a single factory worker salary. It would be just impossible nowadays in most of the west.
Basically you have more then third of women working in any except oldest one. Third of women is a lot of women, a lot of households.
Moreover, people kind of tend to forget that women needs to eat even if husband died or got sick, even if they are single, even if husband is unemployed, even if husband is alcoholic, even if husband is in prison. People also kind of tend to forget that having to marry anyone just so that someone feeds you is one path toward disasterous abusive marriages you are trapped in (where you still have to pretend everything is ok for appareances sake).
And 1950 is when economy was the best, male employment was like 95%. And you still had women who were married and they worked and their income mattered to family. (Surprising example is Rosa Parks who worked for money and loss of income was issue to her and her husband.)
> We've gone backwards all in the name of progress.
It's not done in the name of progress, it's done in the name of profitability.
The rate of profit and worker productivity are at all time highs, but who benefits? Worker compensation has been stagnant and decoupled from profitability and productivity increases for close to five decades now. Even engineer compensation hasn't kept up with productivity, inflation and cost of living increases.
If they both want to work, then child care should be affordable for the dual income family. Generally it's not which is why schools are required to fill that care gap and be in sync with working hours.
There's a bit of a math problem there, though. It's hard to make things work out so that the child care is affordable for the parents, the teachers get reasonable compensation, and you're meeting reasonable (and, depending on where you are, legal) standards for child-caregiver ratios.
Doubly so if "affordable for the parents" means "affordable for parents who are in the same income bracket as your average pre school teacher."
True, although kids are only of childcare age for a few years, so if all adults share the cost burden of childcare for everyone throughout their working lives rather than just paying for their own needs for a few years, the math works out a lot easier. (IE, childcare paid or subsidized by the government.)
The other piece of the puzzle though is that there need to be sufficient providers, which can't happen instantaneously. So you'd have to scale up such an initiative in a sensible way.
I know that borders on callousness, and obviously I don't think we shouldn't take care of single parent households that don't have an option or that the child tax credit shouldn't be high enough so kids don't go hungry. Just if you reduce this to the choice to have a child and a lack of outlying circumstances, you shouldn't have a kid if you don't have someone ready to take care of them and the freedom to make that choice.
Well, maybe, but many parents would probably both work anyways because they would be competing with other dual income family units for housing, schooling and other cost intensive resources.
This wouldn also imply return to same domestic violence rates as used to be, because half population would be dependent again with no power to change own situation. Even currently the rates of it goes up and down with who is getting jobs.
Also, there are other reasons why the situation you desribes as ideal sparked the protests back then - for many people ir was unhappy unsatisfying sitiation.
Later drop offs would be exceedingly difficult for lower income families because their schedules are fixed and not as flexible as higher income jobs. I think permanent DST is a long time coming, but after the pandemic, it’s clear the lack of flexibility that lower income families face.
> I think it's mostly the teachers and the administrators who advocate for the earlier times. Well, that and parents who drop off their kids before work.
So what if teachers have children they need to drop off before work? That leads to some kind of infinite recursion.