(April 8, 2005) — Since the beginning of time, or at least school, teachers have undoubtedly had to answer the ever-present question from impatient students: “why do I have to go to school?” Across the board, teachers’ answer have been “to prepare you for the real world” or some similar logical-sounding statement. The implication here is that the “real world” will be more difficult than school is, but with the constantly increasing demand for test performance driven by American feelings of inadequacy compared to other nations with better schooling systems, the opposite is rapidly becoming true. After a long history of abuse of factory workers, in 1835 skilled male workers first started to push for a ten-hour workday, a demand which was then taken up by female textile workers. Laws protecting the ten-hour day were passed in some states beginning in 1847. Then, the Knights of Labor pushed for the eight-hour day, which they won for approximately 200,000 of their members in 1886. To this day, an eight-hour day is considered a decent day’s work: nine to five or some equivalent time span. The school day itself is seven hours, which seems about right as the step before moving into full membership in the workforce. But this leaves only an hour for homework before it equals an adult workday—translating to just a little over eight minutes allotted to each class per night. This is obviously quite a way from what really happens to most students. Many, if not most Clark students, have five or more hours of homework per night, which works out to a twelve-hour workday or a 60-hour week, if the student receives nothing extra over the weekends, which is rarely the case. This is in sharp opposition to the 40 hours considered “full time” for adults. While there are certainly exceptions—such as workaholics who work 60 or even 80-hour weeks in the adult world—the majority do not suffer through the same workload as students. While it’s not hard to see the reasons teachers feel the need to assign hours of homework—what with the extreme pressures applied by our test-driven curriculum—what this workload really does is condition students to be workaholics and destroy their love of life. It is no wonder that suicide is the third leading cause of death for youth aged 15 to 24 when the only choices appear to be a life of near-slave like work or else imminent and terrible failure if a student does not adhere to the exorbitant time-demands of school. Some students even try to work after-school jobs that push overcrowded schedules over the brink of insanity. With this backdrop, it is not hard to imagine why so many students absolutely loathe school. Is it so difficult to imagine that if they had time to enjoy themselves such that school was not their whole life, they might be able to get more out of school, to actually concentrate and not hate the very idea of learning, as opposed to a constant state of mental rebellion whose end result is destroying any possible benefit that the endless hours of “education” could have conveyed. This is not a problem that school reform alone could remedy. It would require a reordering of all of American society, such that superhuman productivity is less valued than healthy, realistic living.