Ummm... Wrote:
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> There was high school long, long, long before all
> these devices came along. Kids stayed up late and
> were difficult to wake in the morning anyway.
> Rural kids had to get up early and "do chores",
> then ride a bus for an hour to get to school at
> all. According to Norman Rockwell, this was all
> good and healthy and true red-white-and-blue
> all-American. Now "sleeping in" is what we want
> to teach kids instead?
Times change. The world Rockwell was describing is gone. You know what there was to do at night back then - nothing. Now you have access to an amazing array of information and entertainment 24/7. Kids today are growing up in a different world. You could say we are teaching them to sleep in by moving their time to get out of bed to 6:30 am but in my opinion that hardly constitutes 'sleeping in.'
We live in a much faster much more efficiency driven world. Kids dont get up to do farm chores any more because we have industrialized agriculture. I want to prepare our kids for the world they will live in not the one Rockwell painted 65 years ago. The kids that like to stay up late will be the ones trading in overseas markets or writing code late into the night - they can be productive all times of the the day and night.
Face it, thinking of getting up before the sun is a good thing for moral character is a thing of the past; from a time when having one kid milk cows in the morning was commercially viable.