system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: high school students shouldn't be required to put in more than 40 hours a week.

This isn't of any immediate personal relevance (that was a while ago), but I know a few people who are currently in high school so it comes up occasionally.  It seems strange to me that the high school students I know are apparently working longer hours than I do as a grad student.  (I know their program is more work than average; I'm not claiming that your average high school student is putting in 60-hour weeks.)

I don't have that much of an in-depth argument thought out for this, but it seems fairly straightforward.  In short, it seems odd to me that what's considered overtime for an adult is considered entirely acceptable for an adolescent.  Workloads that result in homework eating a substantial portion of one's free time can't be healthy (for a teenager), and I don't see a benefit to a "stress test" approach for high school students.  They're there mostly to learn how to learn and function, and I don't think that should require more than 40 hours a week of total commitment.  Even when adults voluntarily take on heavier workloads, it's often a source of significant strain and not too good for their health--and that for someone who made the choice for themselves, is considered fit to do so, and probably has better time management skills.

There's plainly a cost (stress, less time for exercise/hobbies/friends/family, lost sleep, etc), and I don't see what the benefit is, unless someone wants to argue that people couldn't plausibly prepare for the more rigorous university programs in a 40-hour week.

I don't think the implementation details are all that important, but presumably it'd be something to the effect of a hard cap on homework volume or similar.

I think there would be three major ways to change my view on this:

1. Demonstrate that there is no plausible way to implement such a limit.  (Unlikely.)
2. Demonstrate that at least some reasonably-common trajectories unavoidably require more than 40 hours' a week worth of preparation.
3. Demonstrate that the costs I've assumed are actually negligible.
gpt
>Demonstrate that there is no plausible way to implement such a limit. (Unlikely.)

Motivated students would easily break it. Even if you reduced class time, there's no guarantee that students wouldn't just fill the time with more extracurriculars or even take dual credit classes at a local community college to gain an edge on college admissions.