5 Ways Modern Schooling Is Making Students Dumber

5

Homework Isn't Just Pointless; It's A Health Hazard

According to most educational experts, the standard for homework should be the ten-minute rule -- i.e. absolutely no more than 10 minutes per grade per night, with kindergartners getting no homework at all. But lo and behold, research has found that on average, first-graders get three times as much homework as recommended, while kindergartners are getting 25 minutes of assignments, when the only things they should be taking home from school are crappy drawings and head lice.

And homework overload isn't just pointless busywork, but downright toxic. Many studies have shown that, especially in elementary school, homework doesn't improve scholastic achievement. In fact, it's likely causing the opposite. For young students, too much homework is "detrimental to their attitude about school, their grades, their self-confidence, their social skills, and their quality of life," according to pediatric clinical director Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman. It doesn't matter whether you're going the extra mile for corporate or Mrs. Sing in third grade; being forced to work in your off-time is a surefire path to burnout.

And that also applies to the parents helping with homework, who feel the same stress and anxiety from having to spend hours a week as an unpaid substitute teacher. All this time, the graffiti in the school bathroom was right. Homework sucks.

4

School Starts When Teens Are Still In Sleep Mode

In case you haven't noticed their mutating skin and wildfire hormones, teens are biologically different from both kids and adults. And that also applies to their circadian rhythm. Our bodies produce the hormone melatonin to regulate sleepiness. As kids, melatonin secretion starts knocking us out in the early hours of the night, which is why babysitters have so much free time to mess up your Netflix algorithm. But during puberty, this nocturnal melatonin downer is delayed by several hours, making it difficult for teens to fall asleep before 11 p.m.

With that shift in their sleep cycle, the America Academy of Pediatrics advises that these growing bodies should not be dragged out of bed until 8 a.m. at the earliest. But because that timing's slightly inconvenient for adults (who've all forgotten what it's like to be a teenager), society doesn't care. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 73% of teens get under eight hours of sleep a day, and a staggering 43% get under six hours. Meaning almost three out of four teens are shuffling around taking exams and handling saws in shop class while chronically sleep-deprived.

Antonioguillem/Adobe StockYou read that right. Teens who can stay conscious in class get better grades. These are the groundbreaking discoveries we bring you here at Cracked.

3

Learning Styles Are Unscientific And Counterproductive

Surveys have shown that up to 97% of teachers believe tailoring lessons to students' learning styles gets better results. Schools spend tons of their precious funding on seminars and consultants to help teachers unlock their classrooms' neurological cheat codes. Some go so far as making students wear badges, like the lamest possible version of Hogwarts.

U.S. Department of Education via Flickr"Don't make me find out your learning style is getting pimp-slapped."

2

Arts Classes Are Way Too Important To Cut

Schools in low-income districts like inner cities and rural areas are often forced to cut classes due to small budgets. Just like in gym class, it's always the creative ones that get cut first. A U.S. government study in 2012 showed that 1.3 million elementary students and 800,000 high-schoolers received no music lessons whatsoever, with similar numbers for the visual arts. And in some states, as many as one in three public school kids will never have the opportunity to make a Mother's Day ashtray or badly recite a Shakespeare poem while their voice is still breaking.

U.S. Dept. of EducationNot that we love children's theater, but trading it for more standardized tests still kind of seems like a shit deal.

1

The Youngest Kids In A Grade Keep Getting Misdiagnosed With ADHD

Over the past two decades, ADHD diagnoses for young children have gone up a staggering 40%. Roughly one in every ten kids today is slapped with the label. But doctors noticed that a lot of these wall-bouncers had one thing in common: They were the youngest in their class. Typically, the cutoff age for starting school is a mere day before the year commences. This means kids born 363 days apart wind up in the same class. And nowhere is that gap more noticeable than in kindergarten or first grade, where children are still aging in dog years. Compared to a feral being aged four years and two days, a five-year-old's behavior is almost stately.

Yet teachers only see their youngest students unable to engage or concentrate, as if that's not perfectly reasonable behavior for someone who was a toddler not a year prior. These concerns are then passed on to parents, who pass them to diagnosis-happy doctors. As a result, medical studies have observed that kids born in the last month of the yearly cutoff are over-diagnosed with ADHD by a whopping 30-34% compared to their slightly older peers. They then also receive disproportionately heavy treatments for their relative age. This is so worrying that experts are now encouraging parents to hold their sweet summer children back a year, if only so the system won't pump them full of concentration meds for the temerity of acting their age.

V.R. Craft wrote a comedy called Fail to the Chief, about a reality show to elect the president. She also wastes times on social media and writes science fiction, humor, and satire on her blog, Sharable Sarcasm. Christian Markle wants you to check out these cute comic strips.

For more, check out If High School And College Textbooks Were Honest:

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