Sleeping

The tired, sleepy student. It’s an image ingrained into many minds as we envisage the typical classroom.

Young people, who need more sleep than any other age group apart from infants, are not getting enough sleep. The more scientific research is conducted on the matter, the more we realise how vital it is to the health and especially the cognitive function of young people. But they are not getting it. This is because of the early starts (it’s early by their standards) of school. The most active period of most young people is during the night. If all young people went to bed earlier, there wouldn’t be a problem. But how on Earth can you humanely enforce earlier bedtimes. You can’t. So school needs to adjust to their sleeping patterns to ensure their health and well-being.

Some people are morning people. Most people definitely aren’t. Everyone has their own natural circadian rhythm and school needs to make sure it is not jeopardising the health of young people. Especially since it’s such a crucial stage in their development.

The sleepy student is not the good student. Their performance on anything mental and even physical is greatly crippled by school’s logic that young people aren’t risk takers with their health and will seek an earlier bedtime to accommodate their school schedule. The structure of school is negatively impacting young people’s development.

Looking at Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, one would see that physiological needs have to be satisfied before anything else. So if your genes predispose you for a sleeping pattern that consists of sleeping in the early morning, and if you don’t satisfy this urge, your mind is going to be thinking about this particular urge and not about self-actualisation.

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