May 24, 2023 by AJ Martin (‘24)
I am currently recovering from a common cold that has effectively lasted five months. Such a thing hardly seems common now that we have learned that washing our hands is a promising idea. Until recently, common colds were over in about a week, with the worst of it being three days in and the latter four days being fine. That was the norm. It seems to me that throughout all of winter and into the first weeks of spring, several of my peers had been sick, tissue boxes always empty. Why is this? Well, I want to posit that the school, in its structure, has fundamentally perpetuated sickness, as it actively hampers all forms of attempting to regain wellness, sleep, exercise, prevention of spreading, and nutrition.
The issue of sleep is the easiest of the four to prove that schools’ hinder and thus fundamentally promote poor health. Teenagers, on average, have circadian rhythms in line with night owls. We start to feel tired at about 11 pm and want to wake up at about 8. So why does school start at 7:49? Simple, the schools are cheap. School buses are used between all schools in a district, which is a smart idea. You should not need more than one set of buses to properly transport all students. However, there is a catch to this Faustian bargain. Young kids are extremely messy. In between runs for younger kids, the school bus is cleaned out. So, the smart thing to do is to make sure they go last, so that in the middle of the day, the buses can be cleaned. This would be fine and good, except for a second factor, the nine-to-five.
Young kids often are not trusted to get ready or go out to the bus by themselves. A smart thing to do then is to have parents help them get ready. Often however, the parents have a job to get to, so realistically, the bus cannot pick up kids past 8:30. These two ideas in tandem create disastrous effects on high school aged children, who must be at school realistically before 8:00. Not accounting for getting ready for the day, or the possible hour-long commute, if you woke up sitting during your first period, you would only just get a healthy level of sleep. But it is to preach to the choir to say the sleep schedule is bad. What about a new angle?
Much ado has been made about how much schools spend on sports, and when the discourse around the school budget comes around, this topic invariably comes back up. Is it not, then, deeply ironic that schools are bad at keeping the students in shape? Often, it is simply a matter of how much sitting is done in horridly unergonomic chairs that were constructed out of a steadfastly rigid material. Those long periods of time spent seated are often combined with a 30-minute bus commute both ways. For reference, mine is an hour both ways. And with four eighty-minute blocks and a 20-minute flex with periods of about 5 minutes for walking, that is more than 7 hours a day sitting down. Any more than eight hours is considered dangerous, so if a conservative 7 hours a day is already spent sitting down, that leaves about an hour of sitting left. I hope you have a standing desk to do your two hours of homework at that point. These are just averages; this could easily be better or worse, depending on the type of classes taken and how long it takes to get to school. However, the fact that the average is on the verge of being extremely unhealthy, something clearly needs to change here as well. Surely it cannot get worse, right?
School is extremely punishing if you miss a day. Anybody who has had to miss school for any variety of reasons should know this. Every single day, there is increasingly more expected of us, and while rising standards is a good thing, the increased work quantity is not. While resources that support online learning were developed during Covid-19 when nobody could go to school, not all classes are currently on board with making absence easy. This is fundamentally a punishment for being sick and staying home about it. Not wanting to spread illness is nowhere on the school’s priority list, and it shows. In my personal experience, the debate between my parents and I whenever I feel sick is if I will miss too much. You objectively learn worse when you are sick, however, school has become so demanding that you must go anyway just to try and keep up. This state of affairs is, again, simply untenable. However, there is a cherry on top of this horrid cake of pestilence. The food.
Recently, in accordance with a certain world-altering event, students can get a free meal from the cafeteria. This change is a fundamentally good one, as it provides slightly less stress to the students and parents about what to bring for lunch every day. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a free lunch. The cafeteria has a couple of options: the main meal, pizza, soup and salad, and the wraps. Pizza is unsurprisingly the winner of the popularity contest here as, while it is basic, it tastes fine. Often, there is suspicion cast upon the work of the lunch ladies’ “meal of the da.” Quite frankly, the soup and salad require more than a modicum of effort to obtain, and the wraps are just four slices of ham in a tortilla with a leaf of lettuce. Pizza tastes good, but it is extremely poor as a source of vitamins and nutrients, both of which are essential to maintaining health. To make matters worse, the cafeteria also allows juice to be your fruit, which simply does not cut it. The processed juice loses a lot of micronutrients by sitting around in juice form. It is still preferable to drink them than to take a fruit and just leave it for someone else, though ideally, we would just have the fruit. So how are things supposed to change?
All these parts in the cog works of school make me grit my teeth. The flagrant disregard of the health of the students should be evident that school makes and keeps us sick. Which makes me physically and metaphorically ill. Unfortunately, at an individual level, there is not much one can do to change this. Indeed, fundamental changes to the structure of school would be necessary to update these outdated systems. This, however, is possible. Just because something is difficult, does not mean it should not be done.