Children, as full human beings, and as biological and social beings with competences, faults and qualities, are the product of genetics and of the physical and cultural milieu around them.

In the opinion of the majority of learning and knowledge specialists, the absorption of ideas, concepts and values that characterise the political paradigm of the society where one is born, grows up, learns, and lives, is still the main factor shaping identity and personality.

However, education and behaviour regulating models and systems are not always sufficiently adapted to reality. From a sociological, psychological, and cognitive stance, the devised and implemented educational programmes are considered to be the most appropriate strategies for knowledge transmission and acquisition, and for gaining the essential conscience to develop the “capacities to acquire capacities”, or, as Vítor da Fonseca put it, “to learn how to learn”. Current educational strategies aim to prepare young people for their future social, family, emotional, and professional lives. Accordingly, they intend to be core instruments to enable this multi-directional success throughout their lives. Schools and teachers, educational programmes and strategies, and, now more than ever, educational agents at a global level, are not aimed at individuals but groups, despite the specific attention paid to some of these groups, which “need” a more publicized and often individualized learning approach. This situation is frequently taken into account when schools have to deal with situations involving children lacking particular “cognitive capacities to solve problems”[1].

Nevertheless, and despite the successive experiments and multiple theoretical contributions from pedagogy and educational pedo-psychology, in the practical field of education we notice that the percentage of academic underachievement continues to be very high. Basically, there two sets of reasons for this. One group of justifications, for motives not too difficult to understand in the light of biomedical sciences, attempt to explain the wide range of behaviours and the major differences with regard to the quest for knowledge, level of curiosity, attention lability, intelligence coefficient, higher or lower cognitive inclination, and exercised memory capacity. There are other reasons, of a strictly socio-economic and political nature, and apparently more conspicuous and understandable, that take into account the inevitable weight of distinct cultural, contextual and life influences which, with some exceptions, shape habits, gestures and characters. However, they also end up encouraging educational asymmetries that often cannot be corrected by doctors, teachers or schools and which, in adulthood, translate into cognitive disorders seldom identified with individual, academic and professional success.

According to recent statistics, between fifty and sixty thousand children in Portugal do not study beyond year 9 of schooling. There are many reasons behind this phenomenon. I will analyse one of them: the “alleged” neurophysiological incompatibility with regular school timetables. Recent sleep neurophysiological studies seem to indicate that, when children reach puberty and undergo deep biopsychological and neurohormonal changes, they appear to suffer from a “sort of delay” in their biological clock, in other words, start to fall asleep later and to wake up later“[2]. This means that many school-aged children find it very difficult to focus and learn during the first part of classes in the morning, particularly when “facing more challenging topics”[3] . The neurohormonal agents and mechanisms responsible for the vigil state, in some people, just between mid and the final part of the morning, ensure an attention span and brain and cognitive lucidity that are sufficient for the interactive and participated learning process.

However, other authors (A. Gomes, J. Tavares and M. Azevedo) suggest that people, in this case, children, can be classified according to two distinct groups: the early birds, early-morning risers or larks, and the night wanderers, nighthawks or owls”[4]. According to these researchers “the majority of the population stands in an intermediary position”. The “larks” have biological rhythms responsible for a state of morning wake and are clearly more adapted to the early part of the day. The “owls” have a quite distinct sleep-wake cycle and suffer from great drowsiness in the morning, with extremely reduced interest and attention span levels, which may inexorably threaten their academic performance. On the other hand, the processing of brain and cognitive information, as well as the consolidation of memories and learning, seem to depend on the number of hours slept, timescale and regularity.

“With regard to the amount of sleep that is needed to be able to function adequately, it is known that sleep deprivation affects, among other cognitive functions (…) divergent and flexible thinking, the capacity to deal with surprise and novelty, verbal fluency, giving innovative answers” and the capacity to give simple and routine answers (Horne, 2000) [5].

Many children have study and work schedules that extend well beyond their stay at school, where they spend 8 to 9 hours daily, and need to prepare lessons and academic work or tasks at home. This fact interferes with the normal number of evening rest hours, and gives origin to some deprivation and irregularity in their sleep-wake cycle.

On the other hand, for social, economic and cultural reasons which are not always recommended, societies, the majority of youngsters tend to identify with the group of “owls” in terms of late wake and activity time schedules. This is because they often follow the footsteps of their relatives, who are oblivious, ignorant, and illiterate, or who relinquish their role as educators, tutors or discipline enforcers. For this group of children, faced with the huge appeal of the media, particularly television and the Internet, sleep is of secondary importance and its irregularity, deficit, and lack of quality has harmful consequences in the quality of their rest. The sleeping period that is essential for the physical, mental and psychological balance and performance of these children and young people is cut short too early, around 6 or 7 am, and is not in the least compatible with the school timetable they are often forced to have.

The studies and reflections carried out by researchers and which informed my own thinking indicate that young people “with late sleeping schedules have poorer school results (…). Students in the “owl” group and who have adopted later sleep-wake patterns”[6],  for plausible reasons that may be positive or not, may underachieve at school merely because their school schedules are not adjusted to their sleep-wake biological patterns.

This is an important issue that needs to be addressed, if at any point those responsible for educational policies wish to understand and amend school underachievement among Portuguese students. The reasons behind this problem are not to be found in further education, and are rooted in secondary, elementary, and even pre-school education.

Healthy habits lead to healthy minds.

It would be interesting to carry out surveys or questionnaires on sleeping and waking habits and relate them to school behaviour and achievement. This might help us understand and correct this problem, which apparently originates in childhood and becomes more acute in adolescence, leading to considerable school underachievement. Although latest statistics on the number of failures in the 2007-2008 academic year in Portugal point to a significant improvement of the quality of education and, in the opinion of our two latest ministers of education, constitute a remarkable result that was only made possible thanks to “the deep commitment of all those involved in the process”, despite all the troubles that occurred in that academic year, we would like to believe that those positive results stemmed from better learning and not from other reasons, such as premeditated withdrawal from responsibility and easy-going attitude of educationalists in an attempt to preserve their own evaluation and pedagogical image, disguising and postponing the problem, and putting off school failing to the last years of schooling cycles. If the truth of education is Portugal is distorted, as many think it is, very few of our school-aged children will benefit from their own learning, regardless of the training, integration and implemented educational strategies, unless a complete school reform takes place. Otherwise, Portugal will remain poor today and poorer in the future.

Setting up groups of students according to their particular biophysiological condition and place them in time schedules that are more suitable to their biorhythms could be one of the solutions, among others, to reduce academic and professional underachievement.

Are all those in charge of our children’s school education and training, educators, psychologists, sociologists and, above all, politicians, who have the duty to reflect, decide and legislate, aware of this scientific fact?
Assuming that “many have awoken to this fact”, when will they oppose their “chronic and ill-fitting governing biorhythms” and wake up, once and for all, to the need to find a better solution for this nationwide problem?

 

João Frada
Doctor/Retired University Professor of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon
joaojcfrada@gmail.com

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[1] Vítor da Fonseca, Aprender a Aprender: a educabilidade cognitiva, Lisbon, 2007, p. 54
[2] S.a., Estudar pela manhã pode prejudicar rendimento escolar cons. 14.03.2007
[3] Idem
[4] Ana A. Gomes, José Tavares, Maria Helena P. Azevedo, Padrões de Sono-Vigília e (In)sucesso Académico no Ensino Superior, p.2 [Study carried out by researchers of the University of Aveiro, members of the Sleep Disturbance Clinic – HUC, and by members of the Department of Psychology of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Coimbra]  accessed on 15.03.2007
Idem, p.1
[5] Idem p. 1
[5] Idem p. 3

Bibliografia

FONSECA, Vítor da, Aprender a Aprender: a educabilidade cognitiva, 2ª edição, Lisboa, Âncora Editora, 2007.
GOMES, Ana A., TAVARES, José, AZEVEDO, Maria Helena, Padrões de sono-Vigília e (In)sucesso Académico no Ensino Superior, 13 p.
MELLO, Luciana, Os Ritmos Biológicos e os Horários Escolares
S.a., Estudar pela manhã pode prejudicar rendimentoescolar