Is Class TIme a Luxury? Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, a university president and author of the article “Education is Not a Luxury,” argues against the current public education schedule. His key points center around the flaws of an agrarian-based school calendar with 9:00-3:00 hours from September to June. His plan? Trachtenberg wants to move public education to a 9-5 workday eleven months a year in a university model. He optimistically believes that this would give more prep time for teachers, longer office hours, time for student research, and all after-school activities would be built into the school day. Trachtenberg argues that our current school calendar does a disservice to teachers and students, but his bias, lack of reasoning, and qualifications discredit him. …show more content…
He writes, “I will not confess but assert that by far most of the students I have observed quickly realize that they are here to learn and the opportunities are everywhere… they are responding to the atmosphere.” The people he is referring to are college students. This point actually hurts his argument because the benefits of the college atmosphere are so significant because of the high school atmosphere in the status quo. Changing the high school schedule mitigates the importance of the college atmosphere. Additionally, college students do not follow a 9:00-5:00 schedule year-round, and it is common to go to classes fewer than five days a week. Increasing the time spent in high school does not prepare students for college because it is not the same environment or comes close to the same hours of class