South Korea’s 9am school start time policy provides youth with enough sleep to improve their physical and mental health, increase their ability to focus on learning, and make better use of their mornings. It also has the positive effect of strengthening family ties and improving students’ overall quality of life.
I am in favor of the 9:00 start time policy, and here’s why.
First, a later school start time provides an improved sleep environment. Nowadays, students are forced to wake up early in the morning to meet an early school start time, which means they don’t get enough sleep for their growing bodies. In fact, while our students are working the longest hours of any OECD country, the average high school student sleeps the least at 5 hours and 48 minutes. Getting more sleep can improve physical and mental health during the formative years of adolescence, leading to better concentration and therefore better learning. With classes currently running before 9:00, students are often sleepy from lack of sleep, and research shows that on average, students who sleep less than seven hours a night are 1.4 times more likely to have suicidal thoughts than those who sleep seven or more hours a night. It is expected that low sleep duration plays a significant role in Korea’s not-so-low youth suicide rate, and it should be addressed by improving sleep duration along with other methods. Therefore, it is necessary to increase sleep duration by adjusting school hours.
Second, implementing a 9 o’clock school start time gives students more options to utilize their morning time. Currently, outside of Gyeonggi-do, which has implemented a 9:00 a.m. school start time, it is difficult for students to utilize their morning time for anything other than getting ready for school and attending school. It depends on the school, but if you have an early start time, you have to get up at 7:30 a.m., so you have to get up at 7:00 a.m., excluding travel time and preparation time. Therefore, it is not impossible to do other activities after waking up, but it is difficult because you have to reduce your sleep time even more. If you don’t wake up early enough, it’s hard to eat breakfast, and even if you do, you’ll have to skip it if your parents aren’t up to make it for you. But with a 9:00 start time, you’ll have an hour to an hour and a half of free time, depending on whether you’re currently on a school day or not, and you’ll be able to do things that you couldn’t do before. For example, a typical liberal arts student currently has to leave for school early, between 7:30 and 8:00 a.m., which means they have to leave before the rest of the family is even awake. But if their parents’ start time is the same as their siblings’, they can wake up with their families, eat a healthy breakfast, exercise in the morning to make up for lost time, catch up on sleep, and more, which can add more flexibility to their busy lives.
Third, a later school start time can increase family bonding. In many families, parents and students follow their own schedules, making it difficult for them to spend time together. With a 9:00 start time, families will naturally wake up at a similar time, which will increase the opportunity to eat breakfast together and spend the morning talking. This will go a long way towards increasing family bonding. Time with family will provide students with emotional stability, which will have a positive impact on their learning and life in general.
A counter-argument to the first argument is that a later school start time will result in a later overall dismissal time, which will result in a later school day, and therefore no real increase in sleep. Here are my thoughts on this. First of all, for students who do not attend many hagwons, a later dismissal time will not be applicable as they will still be able to fulfill their afternoon schedule, and for students who attend many hagwons, the current Elementary and Secondary School Act does not allow hagwons to be open after 10 pm, so it is unlikely that their sleep time will be delayed because of attending hagwons. It could also be argued that if this is the case, then there will be no change in learning and therefore no change in sleep duration, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that the time in a 24 hour period minus sleep is learning time and that learning time is proportional to the amount of learning. If we create conditions for students to concentrate through improved sleep, then a 60-90 minute reduction in study time will not reduce learning.
An anticipated counter-argument to the second argument is that delaying the start of the school day will result in most students spending the extra time in the morning sleeping, rather than eating breakfast with their families, exercising in the morning, or doing other activities besides sleeping. Of course, for most students it will be sleep time, but for some it will be a time that can be used autonomously to catch up on sleep. In all cases, given the freedom, students’ choices may vary. But the important thing is to give them the choice, and I think that’s where society should be headed. And for those students who only use it as a sleep time, it can also be used as a way to fill in the gaps in their sleep – just knowing that their right to sleep is guaranteed, and that it can potentially be an open time, is enough to make it worthwhile for them to have a little more freedom in their lives.
Additional objections to this policy include body rhythms, going too far, time commitment for working parents, and transportation issues. Regarding body rhythm, high school students who take practice tests or high school juniors who take the SAT have difficulty adjusting their body rhythm because the test starts at 8 o’clock. The current SAT and practice tests are timetabled for the current school day, not necessarily the 8 o’clock start time, so if the 9 o’clock start time policy is fully implemented, most exams will change to the new timetable.
As for the opinion that Gyeonggi Province opposes the 9:00 school start policy because it was rushed to implement it without enough notice, resulting in many conflicts, this was a wrong way to proceed without social consensus and without considering the views of teachers, students, and parents, so it should be avoided, but this in itself is not a reason to oppose the 9:00 school start policy. In the future, it will be fine if we continue to forewarn about the implementation through surveys and polls and implement it according to the results.
In addition, there is an objection from working parents with young children who already send their children to school early to get ready for work, but if the 9:00 school start time is implemented, it will be difficult for them to get ready in the morning because it will overlap with their work time. This is an issue that can be addressed by creating mechanisms such as morning library openings and earlier morning programs, and we do not believe that these improvements should take precedence over the right of young people to sleep.
In conclusion, the 9:00 a.m. school start time policy should be implemented with enough notice and research before it causes backlash from the public because of the problems of body rhythm, unreasonable policy implementation, and the problem of working couples’ commuting time. However, other small problems should be improved through additional methods, and these problems cannot be seen as taking precedence over students’ right to sleep. This policy should be implemented because it will increase the sleep time of Korean teenagers who are living with a heavy workload and lacking sleep time, and it will make their lives easier through autonomous use of morning time.
