Time spent in school

In Sweden 9 years of schooling is compulsory. Some of the practice is regulated by law. This is true for the timetable. So during this 9 years the pupils get tuition during 6 665 hours. Sounds like a lot, but it really is not even if one has to add time spent on homework. In 1993 I did the following calculation when I was responsible for developing the timetable for compulsory schools at the Ministry of Education.

So lets assume that all children sleeps 8 hours per day. That leaves us with 16 hours per day awake. Every year is 365 days which gives us 5 840 hours to spend per year and subsequently 52560 hours during these 9 years. This means that children actually spend about 13% of their waken time in school (6665/52560=0,1268). To make it easier to remember and taking into account that some probably sleeps more than 8 hours I usually use 15%. Of this I am always reminded when it comes to discussions about “what else” that should be the responsibility of schools, when we evaluate what is achieved, when we blame it (i.e. the school, teachers) for shortcomings and so on.

Recalls this because me referencing Nicklas Lundblads thoughts about teaching coding, not for the purpose of making everybody a programmer but for to empower children with the concepts, tools and theorems and possibly also their problem solving skills, started some discussions both on Twitter and on Google+. If we wanted to spend some time on coding should we add this (expensive) or replace some other subject or part thereof.

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In Sweden 9 years of schooling is compulsory. Some of the practice is regulated by law. This is true for the timetable. So during this 9 years the pupils get...