Kimchi Ice Cream has a great post up about how Korean kids get the least amount of sleep in the world. It is quite full of a liberal amount of links and evidence, and it’s worth a read.
This is no news for teachers here in Korea. We see the end result of a middle schooler who hasn’t gotten more than 4 or 5 hours of sleep a night in months on a daily basis in our classrooms. I have learned not to ask my kids how much they sleep, because it invariably depresses me. My students are in the range of 6th-8th graders in the US school system equivalent, and yet many of them (I’d even argue probably *most* of them) leave for school at 8am and don’t get back home until after midnight. They have normal public school during the day from 9-4:30, then after school they generally go to private cram schools, called hagwons (notorious among us foreigners for not paying their teachers, forcing unpaid overtime, etc), until anywhere from 9pm to 1am (even 2am is not unheard-of), depending on the student and how close to exam time it is.
I’ve complained before about the seeming inability of Koreans to understand the concept of diminishing returns, and this is a perfect example. What this results in is kids who are too tired to actually do any sort of quality learning in the classroom, and most certainly who are too tired and brain-weary to have much of any creativity. I strongly suspect that it’s a rather large contributing factor to the problems that Korean students have with critical thinking skills. While I still believe that that particular issue is largely a result of culture and the education system, the chemical effects of chronic sleep deprivation have got to have a negative effect on that sort of thinking as well.
I’ll stop writing now though, as Kimchi’s entry really says it all.
Thanks for the blog post / article. Now it makes way more sense that my Korean students think that having 5 hours of sleep a night is good.