Education - It's About Time
It's About Time
"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."
— Gandalf advising Frodo Baggins in Lord of the Rings
How our culture thinks about time is harmful, full stop, and the implications for the next generation are frightening. What is at stake is nothing less than their chance for lifetime happiness and fulfillment. But to understand how to teach them, parents first need to unlearn their own mental frameworks about time. If we fail to grasp the significance, we allow current destructive trends in our education system to continue.
The most pernicious ways our modern education system misuses time are: fighting our natural clocks, killing efficiency, inhibiting flow, reworking everything, neglecting relationships, and reinforcing high-time preference thinking. The effects of these misuses compound with each other, and over time. How we view and treat time impacts our well-being more than most realize.
The Most Valuable Education Resource
We have two challenges to overcome. The first is understanding the concepts of time and how they impact us. These are straightforward concepts, easy to understand but often overlooked. We'll explore these in this article.
The second challenge is making changes based on one's understanding. This is not easy. To highlight how difficult it can be, I'll share that it took me decades. My personal journey has not always been fun, yet ironically, it fuels my passion for this subject. Fortunately, humbling experiences are excellent teachers.
Young people today are disheartened, confirmed by surveys showing troubling mental health trends. Many do not see a path to success and happiness. Despite slogans to the contrary, these outcomes are what the education system, whether by design or dysfunction, produces.
I'm a product of public schools filled with dedicated people who sincerely tried to teach me and other students. As a "good student," I trusted the guidance of the experts, focusing on grades, test scores, and activities to maximize chances of getting into the best universities. That trusting, compliant mentality followed me through higher education and right into the Army and corporate America.
On the surface, it looked like I had done everything right. I played by the rules and had the honor and privilege of attending West Point and later Yale.
Below the surface was another story. I was hurting. I dealt with burnout for decades in my pre-entrepreneur career, the majority of which was in logistics and operations. A typical non-peak week was 50-60 hours, not including the 10 hours of commute time. That excludes late-night and weekend calls for safety incidents, machine downtime, and checking emails. Peak times were worse by an additional 10-20 hours.
It was not a one-time occurrence. It was a pattern. I became a subject matter expert in recognizing burnout symptoms, having experienced them in different companies, industries, levels, and roles. As if spending more time at work than with family was not bad enough, the culture compounded the situation. Some organizations were uninspiring, and some were downright toxic. Unhealthy cultures drain your mental energy.
Here's the story I told myself: As the sole breadwinner for our family of six, the daily decision for how to use my time was already answered. Procrastinate. Work another day and figure out a better long-term solution later. The family needed to keep our healthcare coverage. We had financial obligations: the mortgage, two sets of student loans that felt like a second mortgage, and all the usual expenses like food, utilities, the kids' activities.
I was too tired to stay awake reading books to our kids. I would literally fall asleep with Green Eggs and Ham in my hands. My other habits did not help and, in fact, began compounding in bad ways. For example, I once believed relaxing with a glass of red wine at night had no effect on the quality of my sleep. In hindsight, it is not surprising I was too tired to go to the gym.
Why did I not change faster? No excuse. I should have. There were many sprints of inspiration, times when I believed I just needed to push harder. But no matter how fast I ran, my career hamster wheel was not going anywhere. I'm not proud of the pattern: many roles, little fulfillment. Stein's Law held true: "When something cannot go on forever, it won't."
It's about time.
I am grateful for how my experiences prepared me, forced me really, to go deep and find the root causes. Not understanding time was a major contributor to my journey. Had I had the perspective I will describe fully in this article, I would have made profoundly better career decisions and been a more-present Dad.
This article is not for me. It is for you and your kids. If you're feeling similarly trapped, if you're wondering why education feels like it's working against your family rather than for it, this framework might help you see what I couldn't see for decades. Our education system is not the best we can do. It is time to break the cycle. Parents, the younger your kids are, the greater your opportunity to act. Start by unlearning the paradigms of time in today's culture, especially regarding education.
Fighting Our Natural Clocks
As most parents will attest, getting the entire family in the car and ready to leave on time for any event is challenging. Now imagine everyone arriving on time while simultaneously being in a positive mood. For many families, achieving both remains elusive.
One does not need scientific research or an advanced degree to understand that everyone has their own rhythm. Every group of two or more people must deal with this.
No one in our family has aligned sleep schedules. Personally, I do my best work in the morning. My wife does hers later in the day. Our kids each have their own preferences as well. When our kids were young, some would be up early and ready to go. Others would struggle getting out of bed despite alarms, nudges, and the inevitable "get up or we'll be late" threats.
There is a field of science to support this. Chronobiology is the broad term covering the study of biological rhythms. Our internal clock, also known as our circadian rhythm, sets our sleep-wake cycles, hormone release cycles, as well as body temperature, digestion, alertness, and other cycles. Our brains keep all these systems synced to the 24-hour day.
Our individual circadian rhythms impact preferences and behaviors. Morning larks and night owls are common labels to communicate basic chronotypes.
It is important to note our patterns change as we age. Sleep patterns, for example, shift throughout our lives, especially with hormones and other factors in our developmental years. From the child's perspective, the most productive time of day to focus, engage, and learn is later.
This does not align well with a typical school day. The "modern" education system unnecessarily fights kids' natural patterns. It is like fighting gravity. Classes start between 8:00-8:30 a.m. Accounting for travel time, breakfast, hygiene, and the occasional logistical challenge, children must be out of bed by 6:00.
It is not surprising our one-size-fits-all schedules cause issues. Research shows that circadian misalignment is linked to poorer mental health outcomes, with evening chronotypes showing higher rates of depression, anxiety, and related disorders.
What is surprising is that we choose to do this to our kids. We have more educational tools than ever in human history, and this is the best we can do? An education system could, by design, be more flexible to align schedules with chronotypes. In an ideal world, education would be individually tailored. Kids would learn better and more efficiently. Parents could drop the "get up or we'll be late" routine.
Killing Efficiency
I first encountered "hurry up and wait" in the Army. It encapsulates a core part of military service culture in a snarky, but all too true, way. There are long periods of low activity and boredom broken by periodic bursts of high-intensity situations.
No one appreciates wasted time. Waiting is hard for those experiencing the low-activity phase. Contrary to Hollywood portrayals, Army inefficiency doesn't stem from sadistic generals.
One way to explain the Army's culture is incentives. It must ensure it can execute its mission to defend the nation. For that purpose, readiness is the key metric. Do we have enough people? Have they been trained? Do they have the right supplies? Do they have enough equipment? What condition is that equipment in? These are the natural focus areas. So while the Army's leaders care deeply about their personnel, whether they have down periods filled with boredom is not mission critical.
For-profit organizations actively combat wasted time not from altruism, but from competitive necessity. Companies go to great lengths to reduce all forms of waste in their manufacturing, logistical, and support operations. The incentive is clear. The more efficient they are, the more competitive and profitable.
There are countless business school cases highlighting the lesson that fractions of a percent improvement at scale mean millions in savings and profit. We have come a long way since Henry Ford demonstrated the benefits of the assembly line. Today Six Sigma, 5S, Lean, Kaizen, Kanban, and other continuous improvement programs are ubiquitous. In highly competitive industries, a slight competitive advantage is existential.
Like these military and corporate examples, how our education system treats time and efficiency naturally depends on its purpose. We can understand its true incentives by its metrics. Instead of readiness or profit, it's bureaucracy. In this sense, education is more like the military than corporate America. Our centralized education tracks grades, test scores, and above all else, budget-spend-per-student. It does not track, nor report, how well students use their time. Teachers and administrators may care about students' time, but it is not mission critical.
There are many unproductive times between the start and end of a school day for a typical K-12 student. For this thought exercise, I'll label class time as productive time. Everything between classes is buffer time that can be cut without impacting learning. The three big categories are commute time, filler periods, and class transitions.
Travel time to and from school includes a bus ride for younger students and, at the very least, commute time for those with a driver's license. Taking a bus involves waiting at a pickup location before enjoying a 20, 30, or more-minute ride each way. Roundtrip this implies an hour of travel time daily. Including walk and wait times, a student spends up to 90 minutes of every school day commuting.
Middle and high school students often have homerooms. So after getting to one's locker, each student trudges to a room where an adult verifies his or her attendance. This is another 15-30 minutes spent daily unrelated to education. Study halls are also common, especially in high schools. The name is misleading. Based on my experience, very little productive studying occurs there. This adds another hour or more of unproductive time on filler periods, excluding a lunch hour.
Class-transition times further fragment the day. Collectively, students spend an hour walking between classes and lockers.
Without a real student-time-efficiency KPI (key performance indicator), here's some napkin math. Most schools start classes by 8:00 a.m. and end by 3:00 p.m. Including that 90 minutes commuting from earlier, the typical K-12 student has an 8.5-hour school day. Second, we measure productive time. Being generous and saying class time equals productive learning time, 6 classes of 45-60 minutes each equates to 4.5-6 hours per day.
The corollary reveals the waste: students spend 29-47% of their day somewhere other than the classroom.
Contrast this with homeschool or microschool programs. Parents who homeschool or use microschools eliminate this waste. No commute time. No filler study halls. No class transition time. Kids can use this freed-up time for additional study, life experiences, or free play. The benefit of the latter is a whole separate topic, especially when considering outside play.
Killing Flow
"One of the very worst uses of time is to do something very well that need not be done at all."
— Brian Tracy
The assumption that class time equals productive time is weak at best. Even by metrics such as test scores, it is not true. We are not getting the results we desire. Quality of time matters more than quantity.
Imagine if we had a fresh start, a blank slate for designing an education system. It would encourage and support flow, that state of being when students' minds are so engaged they reach their maximum productivity. This is in the best interest of the kids and therefore in the best interest of parents. In fact, it is in the best interest of our national security. Meanwhile, our economic competitors focus relentlessly on STEM education.
Some schools and teachers do focus on STEM. We need more. Let's acknowledge, however, that working inside the system is an uphill battle because our school days are structured to decimate flow.
Flow is a concept we grasp intuitively. Even young children get it. We naturally believe in our untapped potential. We appreciate and value excellence. Peak performers in every field, from athletics to entertainment, from business to politics, capture our attention. We read stories, watch movies, and when possible, pay to see live performances of the very best. Elite performers invest heavily in personalized coaching.
One pattern emerges: the higher the level, the more individualized the coaching. That intense level of focus is the opposite of one-size-fits-all education.
Classrooms become ineffective when subjects misalign with children's interests and talents. The higher the student-to-teacher ratio in a classroom, the more teaching to the average hurts all students. Those who get the material faster are held back from reaching their potential. They become bored or frustrated.
Those who struggle with the material also lose time. They may need to invest more time later with tutoring or self-directed homework, or they may never learn the material. Homeschooling, on the other hand, leverages the freedom for deep work.
Age-based grouping compounds this problem. Even when kids have similar aptitudes for a subject, they may be most receptive to learning it at different ages.
Even under ideal conditions, flow states are difficult to achieve. But assume students overcome the talent-mismatch challenges. Momentum, once achieved, deserves protection. The last thing you want to do is interrupt the science lab, the coding, the writing, the Socratic discussion, or any other engaged learning experience. Yet we schedule classes for 45-60 minutes. Whatever learning momentum that starts is interrupted with an annoying bell.
Lastly, school days typically include scheduled study halls. This isn't inherently bad. However, it does increase the risk of distraction. Homeschoolers have better control of when and how students use social media and play video games. These focus-killers inhibit effective learning for everyone. That is just the first-order impact. Kids carry learning habits into adulthood, so the negative effects compound over their lifetime.
Reworking Everything
Having to redo work is frustrating. One of my West Point classmates was breaking "lights out" one evening to finish writing a paper. He fell asleep and somehow managed to lay his head on the keyboard. When he woke up, the screen was filled with nothing but commas. Millions of commas. These were not fast machines like we have today. Even after lifting his head, the program continued to add more as it processed the backlog of clicks. Unfortunately, the paper was unrecoverable. He lost everything and had to start over.
Restoring physical health is much more frustrating. A few years ago, I had a medical scare that really set me back. My routine at the time was to get up at 4:00 a.m., go to the gym, and then start the workday. I was healthy (or so I thought) until the symptoms started. My resting heartrate was increasingly high, and my sleep began deteriorating. The smallest activities exhausted me. Within a week, I could barely move from one room to another. My appetite was gone, and I began losing weight at a very unhealthy pace.
Bloodwork confirmed the doctor's diagnosis that the culprit was my thyroid. My doctor could not pinpoint the exact cause, although my family remains convinced it was stress-related, but he knew how to treat it. Prescription medicine brought my heartrate down almost immediately. The recovery, on the other hand, was slow. It took over a year of eating healthy and lifting weights to regain the weight and strength I had lost in just a few weeks.
The principle is simple: consistent work produces results. There are no shortcuts or cure-all pills. Whether you are training for a marathon or learning to play an instrument, it takes time and focus. You must invest sustained energy over a long period to reach peak levels. Like bitcoin mining, the proof of work is easy to verify. When you see someone at peak levels, e.g., Olympic athletes, you know they paid the price of admission.
Now apply this concept to education. If the goal is preparing successful kids, you'd maintain momentum as they build skills. You certainly wouldn't start and stop progress. Olympic athletes don't train part-time.
Yet this start-and-stop handicap is exactly what we do to ourselves. When the U.S. education system centralized in the early 20th century, our economy was predominantly agricultural. School calendars were designed to follow an agricultural timeline, starting in August or September and ending in May or June. Today, accounting for holidays, weekends, and teacher workdays, the "school year" is 180 days. As a society, we now accept that a normal, “healthy” education system is active only half the year.
"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many... But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason... then accept it."
- Buddha
The impact of the school calendar on learning is devastating. It is more than the lost time during summer break. Schools waste additional time reworking material. When you take a break from a subject like math, it is like taking a break from your gym routine. Students don't resume at their May level, so a large portion of those 180 days goes to reviewing prior material.
Contrast this model with the typical homeschooling schedule. Most families homeschool year-round, thus removing both the lost summer and the rework. We cannot measure "learning/month" precisely, but we can visualize the impact in a simplified way.
This simplified visualization shows the impact: Imagine two students with identical learning capacity and identical teaching programs. Student 1 (the top line) learns year-round. She is the academic version of the full-time athlete. Student 2 (the bottom line) has the same monthly learning capacity. She regresses during her three-month summer break. Not surprisingly, Student 2 lags Student 1 at year-end.
The full effect of the annual gap between Student 1 and Student 2 is worse than it looks because learning is not linear. Each skill or concept opens the potential for greater understanding. Learning the alphabet, for example, opens the door to reading, which opens bigger doors for other subjects. Numbers open the door to math, which opens bigger doors for science.
Productive learning is like dollar cost averaging (DCA), but where students invest knowledge and experience. Each small contribution builds upon the previous, making possible ever greater achievements. Over the standard K-12 years, the net impact of the summer break negatively compounds.
Nothing stops the U.S. from adopting a sound education calendar except us. The bureaucratic, political, commercial, and other non-student stakeholders are too entrenched. No one, regardless of their good intentions, can fix the system from within. The only path for parents is to take self-custody of their children's education.
Having homeschooled our four kids over two decades, I can confirm: the endeavor is 24/7/365. This includes weekends. This is not a bug. This is a feature.
Neglecting Relationships
Things are worse than just wasted and inefficient uses of time covered thus far. The opportunity cost of weakened or lost relationships is even more devastating.
My wife Tali and I met in business school. It was clear from the beginning that we were aligned on family values. For this reason, it was easy to support her when she decided to stay home after our firstborn. We went all-in. We did not merely decide to have a single-income family, we decided to homeschool.
At first, it felt like we were on a deserted island. We got pushback from both sides of our family. Tali's side was particularly challenging. She is a first-generation Chinese-American. Like other first-generation kids, she grew up in two worlds. On one side was her traditional Chinese culture, and on the other, peers were pursuing the American Dream. She highly values excellence, attending an Ivy League school, for example, but felt pressure to pursue career over family.
Society pushback was challenging too until we found like-minded parents in homeschooling communities.
The irony that those who champion "pro-choice" slogans are often the same people who vilify conservatives for their personal life choices is more disturbing than funny. In generations past, it was acceptable for women to choose family over career. It was once encouraged. Today, it is actively discouraged by a large portion of the population, including many teachers and counselors. Women who pursue being a mom are labeled by the left as extreme, weird, or abused. Men today who support a woman staying home to raise children risk accusations of being misogynistic.
To sense how strong the culture has shifted, look to the reactions of "fans" of famous actresses who pursued family life. Lisa Bonet, Sandra Bullock, Uma Thurman, Cameron Diaz, Elizabeth Hurley, and others made a full pivot. Others like Taylor Swift and Jennifer Lawrence continue their careers but prioritize family. Gendered responses range from subtle and demeaning betrayals of feminism, e.g., "tradwife" (traditional wife), to overt objections like "wasted prime" and "Hollywood tragedy," clearly implying careers are more important than family.
Today's article is not meant to fan the fires of the political divide, so it is important to clarify my point. I am not saying a woman's place is at home. I am saying it is her choice. Society should not guilt, bully, or ridicule women who choose this path.
The decision about staying home with children is profoundly important and relevant to education and time. Our education system is designed such that children spend more awake hours away from parents than with them.
Here's the breakdown of connected vs. unconnected time. I assume healthy time for sleep, and that parents working a 9-to-5 job cannot get home before kids are done with school. This afternoon gap may be filled with daycare, sports, or other activities. This leaves a mere 2.5-4.5 hours of potential time together, not accounting for cooking, house chores, or anything else.
That's just K-12. After high school, the amount of time spent together plummets. At college, our culture's presumed best option, kids will spend their waking hours with someone other than parents. This includes professors and administrators who, research shows, predominantly hold liberal views. Statistically, this is not aligned with the general population.
Robbing parents and children of their natural relationship has tangible emotional and psychological consequences. The first consequence is the high opportunity cost. Both parent and child miss daily conversations, shared experiences, and the gradual building of trust. Tali and I heard this firsthand when our daughters visited on college breaks. They shared stories of their college peers who were genuinely shocked to learn our daughters would talk to us. The idea of talking to, let alone trusting, their parents was a foreign concept.
The second consequence is the harm. Strong parent-child bonds support children's growth and development. Weak or missing bonds risk emotional and psychological issues like anxiety, low self-worth, or depression.
Lastly, there is the more sinister impact. Nature hates a vacuum. Separating parents and children opens the door for others to step in and offer direction, support, and meaning. This is not a bug in centrally designed education—it is a feature. It is intentional.
It is no accident that breaking the parent-child bond is a core tenet of authoritarian control, including collectivist ideologies like socialism, communism, Marxism, and various forms of totalitarian authority. It is happening today around the world, even in democracies.
In the U.S., some schools actively work to supplant parental authority and values. News reports of school administrators supporting kids to physically transition genders while actively hiding the process from parents are unconscionable. Not all schools, and certainly not all people in education, support these extreme examples. The risk remains when kids spend most of their waking hours with people other than their parents, a risk that increases with every hour parents and children spend apart.
Reinforcing Short-Term Thinking
Few places today escape short-term thinking. Even as homeschoolers, we struggled with this. Our family schedule was a constant logistical puzzle before the kids reached adulthood. But all the way through, as parents, Tali and I focused on their long-term success.
Josh Waitzkin describes in The Art of Learning how pervasive short-term thinking is even in the world of chess competition. Coaches focus on immediate benefits like memorizing opening moves to the detriment of their players' long-term potential. Clubs rack up more "wins" and are not responsible for limiting players' potential by neglecting basic principles. However, when coaches are with the student for a lifetime, like parents, the incentives align with long-term success. He credits this differentiator as key in his journey to becoming a champion.
State schools reinforce short-term thinking. The pressure for students is on the next class, next exam, next paper, next grade level, and even the next school. Attendance, grades, and test scores are critical for all stakeholders. Kids are guided to the next step on the education ladder. Teachers, coaches, and administrators know they will be evaluated on how well students do on such metrics. Even school budgets depend on these metrics. Once students move to their next step, they are someone else's concern.
This is not sane. The people students look to for guidance have incentives to focus only on the next step. For teachers, it is the semester. For coaches, it is the season. For guidance counselors, it is graduation.
Where in this urgency are critical life skills? When do students get those? Often, it is partway through college when the realization hits students: school does not prepare them for success. The prospect of a low-paying job, if any, and massive student loans prompts many to switch majors. This is no problem for universities who benefit from extra tuition. Like those chess coaches, once students move to their next step (in this case, graduation) they are someone else's concern.
Imagine if we flipped this framework upside down. Instead of experiencing chronic short-term stress, imagine if kids learned first-principle ideas, practiced critical thinking, and mastered life skills. Imagine if we taught them about low time preference, a more formal way of describing long-term thinking. For one thing, this would reduce the pressure to take jobs they otherwise would not want. This would reduce the risk of feeling trapped to stay in such jobs to pay their student loans.
This is an area all parents can address, regardless of state schooling or homeschooling. Just by reading this, you have already started your journey to unlearn the paradigms of time in our culture and education systems. All the misuses we reviewed are opportunities.
Regardless of how old you or your kids are, remember the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is today. Commit to learning more and taking action in whatever way you can. Commit to making time to talk about time with your kids.
Returning to Gandalf's Observation
"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."
Gandalf understood what our modern education system has forgotten: time is the irreplaceable resource. Not money. Not credentials. Not test scores. Time.
We explored six ways our education system misuses this precious resource: fighting natural clocks, killing efficiency, inhibiting flow, reworking everything, neglecting relationships, and reinforcing short-term thinking. Each misuse alone would be concerning. Together, they compound into a system that works against our children's potential for happiness and fulfillment.
The tragedy is that we choose this. We have the tools, the knowledge, and the freedom to do better. Sound education, education that respects children's biological rhythms, eliminates waste, cultivates flow, maintains momentum, strengthens family bonds, and teaches long-term thinking, is possible. It exists in countless homeschools and microschools across the country.
The question is not whether such education is possible. The question is what you will decide to do with the time that is given you.
Your children's time is finite. Each day of inefficiency is a day they cannot reclaim. Each hour spent separated from you is an hour someone else shapes their values. Each break in their learning momentum is momentum they must rebuild.
But each day you take intentional action to protect their time is a day invested in their future. Each hour spent together strengthens bonds that will sustain them through life's challenges. Each year of uninterrupted learning compounds into capabilities that will serve them for decades.
Gandalf's wisdom applies to parents as much as to hobbits on a quest: We cannot control the larger forces shaping our world. We cannot single-handedly reform a broken system. But we can decide what to do with the time given to us and our children.
The choice is yours. What will you decide?
