High school in the United States starts way too early. Given teenagers’ sleep patterns, the ideal school start time could be as late as 11:30 a.m. — when many high school students have already finished half a school day and are eating lunch.
Researchers from Harvard and Oxford wrote about this new finding in a recent article in the journal Learning, Media, and Technology . In the article, Paul Kelley, Steven W. Lockley, Russell G. Foster and Jonathan Kelley argue that, given when kids and teenagers are biologically conditioned to wake up, 10-year-olds should start school at 8 a.m., 16-year-olds should start between 10 a.m. and 10:30 a.m., and 18-year-olds should start between 11 a.m. and 11:30 a.m.
There’s been lots of research done on sleep and performance in school — but this article argues that school should start even later than most proposals for a later start time call for.
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