And I'm an extreme outlier in terms of innate skill, I say without intending it as pride. It's just reality.
Without time to decompress and be mindless, you are constantly building up stress and pressure until you lose overall performance capacity.
Additionally, innate skill does not translate to the ability to handle stress, discipline, or work ethic. Your schedule is entirely unrealistic outside of academia today (or being your own boss), judging from the population of successful people (in finance, software engineers, researchers, politicians, etc) you'll see that most people get by with less than 2 hours of unscheduled time whether forced or by choice.
Personally, I find unscheduled time and being mindless hampers my productivity. I function best under pressure and produce my best work. The most academically successful year of my life was when I was spending 80 hours a week on research, class, and studying (1-2 hours). My point in this is that what works for you is not necessarily the minimum requirement for success.
Also, I am aware of the physiological consequences of stress before anyone gets to that point.
My observations, in a graduate level lab under a very famous professor.
Exactly one person was able to work constantly and do excellent work. He's just a freaking genius, I have no clue how he did it with a child, but apparently he only slept three hours a night. He graduated in 5 years.
About ten people worked really hard, were always stressed and tired, and accomplished almost nothing useful because they never allocated time to actually thinking about what they were doing. These were usually people who had been in the military (Korean and US largely). They usually took 5-8 years to graduate.
About five people worked reasonably hard, but had outside interests. They took seven years to graduate on average.
And then there's lazy people like me, who somehow managed to accomplish work just as useful, but who worked far less and thought far more. I graduated in four years.
Yeah, the sum of anecdotes isn't statistics. But I saw this pattern over and over again in graduate school.
But to your point, if you have a 9-5 normal job, how many hours during that time are you doing effectively what I described? Basically just sitting there staring at your monitor, or getting coffee, or getting lunch, or whatever. I bet the vast majority of employees (yes, I have been employed in industry) spend that eight hour minimum I describe staring blankly into space, they just do it in the office.
Everyone has different limits. Yeah, that term I pushed myself to my limits I was doing serious, no distraction work for about 80 hours a week. I forced myself to take Saturdays off entirely, no homework allowed. That does leave the bare minimum 8 hours required to be a functional human plus sleeping 7 hours a night, and that is what I had to do. I wouldn't repeat it though, and I wouldn't even consider doing it long term.
It's even more depressing when you realize that the majority of people that push themselves to these unhealthy extremes aren't even working on the kind of stuff that matters.
I said up to an hour and a half, In this case you have to tack on a half hour if your numbers are right, but it's not like the issue doesn't apply to rural areas with longer travel times. In addition, you didn't address the larger point that it's simply cutting it too close; you can never account for mitigating circumstances people have in their lives that shave off available time for homework, meaning they have to choose between finishing their homework or getting enough sleep. And the fact that many people that age need 9 hours not 8 hours of sleep.
>Socialization in addition to lunch, recess, and homeroom on weekdays?
Homeroom and recess is not socialization for kids that age. Socialization is hanging out with your friends after school for two hours discussing things of interest and relevance to you or doing something you actually enjoy. You can't assume the time in homeroom, recess, lunch, etc. are actual socialization; opportunities for socialization in school are usually very restrictive and arbitrary. If it isn't socialization by the choice of the student on their own time you can't assume it's actually happening.
>I'm sorry but if you're aiming for academic rigor sacrifices have to be made somewhere.
Sacrifices of what? Adequate sleep? Eating breakfast in the morning? Having free time to hang out with friends after school? You're not addressing the fact that according to the author, empirically many students were sleep deprived according to their parents, so clearly it's the school giving unreasonable burden.
Homework is evil because it's a massive opportunity cost in terms of time.
How about an example with more homework and my experience with times? Let's say 5 hours of homework on a particular night.
School runs from 7:30 to 2:15 with a 45 minute lunch break (no recess (you still get recess in 8th grade? I didn't) or homeroom as the bell rings at 7:30). Then football goes to 5:30. 15 minutes to drive home, so it's now 5:45. Decompress and eat dinner with the family and it's now 7. If I want to get up by 7 then I need to be asleep by midnight at the latest. If I had a 5 hour homework night then that's pretty much all the rest of my day gone, where a 3 hour homework night I have 2 hours remaining in the day.
My solution? I never did homework aside from the occasional last minute essay or project. By 7 I was mentally and physically exhausted and had no desire to put in anymore time for school.
I can't even imagine having nights where I had 5 hours of homework to do.
I want my kid to be able to explore and discover things on his own. Sure, maybe 9 hours of school can be handled - but when will he discover and explore new things?
The only thing I agree with is that this school isn't doing a good job of educating if the student says "Memorization, not rationalization". While the homework appears to be monotonous my understanding was that this is because she is 13, it is important to build the foundation (i.e. comfort with numbers and reading dense literature) that will allow her to pursue more intellectually challenging courses in the future.
The only criticism I have of this system is that the author suggests none of the courses promote critical thinking and creativity. If this is the case then this is a problem, I would think at least 1/5 courses should do that. One of the biggest criticisms of the education system in China (I don't know if this is true but I hear it a lot) is that it promotes rote memorization (with exceptions), and this school appears to be doing the same.
Edit: All of this is predicated on the assumption that this student is academically capable of succeeding at this school. While it takes her 3 hours every night (5 hours max) this may not be the case for the average student, we don't know where she lies on the curve. Anecdotal evidence from some parents is obviously not enough to draw any conclusions.