For 12 years, 180 days a year, 6 hours a day, most students are required by external forces to sit in classrooms, shuffled around periodically, listening to endless lectures while sneaking glances at the clock. What do these 13,000 hours break down to? Nowhere near enough.
An example: a student finishes their work before everyone else. The teacher tells them to sit in silence until the rest of the class finishes. No talking to others, lest you distract them or the people around you. No working on other things; that’s “off topic” and “disrespectful”. And of course, working ahead of the class is frowned upon. If that happens every day, every class, because the standard that other students are held to is considerably lower, imagine how much time anyone mildly ahead wastes.
This is slightly mitigated if teachers are more lenient and allow working ahead or on other classwork, but what happens when all the work for the day is complete? Students just lie down on their desks, listening to the scratching of pencils, occasional coughs, mechanical squeaks of chairs and desks as the micromovements of others’ work engulf their stagnant selves.
In some schools, even that is an extreme example. Teachers allow you to talk to others when you finish, or to work on homework for other classes. But that’s still not enough. A motivated student can complete all of their assigned work and homework for the day, and still have significant swathes of time remaining in which they cannot do anything productive. There is no alternative work provided. If you want to take a more advanced class, wait for a window to open where teachers allow you to test upwards, and even having that as an option is rare.
If you are above the average, the 50% mark, or even above the lowest, the weakest link, school time is not being utilized well by default. Being proactive and organizing your own time is heavily restricted over arbitrary beliefs that it is distracting or inconsiderate to the teacher’s plans.
The salient phrase in that statement is by default. Anyone with ambition can find a way to waste less time, be it unschooling or making arrangements with understanding teachers. But the rest are confined to working within the minimums, following instruction exactly with the rest of the herd, even if they can do more with their time.
An interesting point here is that there was a solution. Students were delegated into "tracks" based on how fast they learned (remedial, regular, honors, etc). But this appears to be going away (as is the gifted/advanced learning system, over seemingly political motives). Slowly lumping everyone together, disregarding their levels of knowledge, passion, and efficiency.
Students need to be taught how to learn, how to pursue their interests and passions, and allowed to productively use the free time remaining after completing the school’s minimum. And the minimum would benefit from being increased, at least in a segmented manner (ie tracks), though this is more difficult to implement on a large scale. But the current state is: the new generation is underutilized and undereducated.
This phenomenon hasn’t been widely studied (I might work on such a project at some point and will update with results if that pans out), however it’s evident that problems exist in the system, and my opinion piece above exists merely to call attention to things I’ve personally noticed. An excerpt from a small study on this topic follows:
Across the five school systems we studied, we found that an average student spent almost three-quarters of their time in the four core subjects (ELA, math, science, and social studies) on assignments that were not grade-appropriate. In a single school year, that’s the equivalent of more than six months of learning time.