Subject: The whole day: why children deserve the 24-hour clock, and the Earth it describes, sooner

October 27, 2026

To the teachers who hand children their first clock, and to the mariners who have kept time by it on watch:

I am writing to both of you at once on purpose. I think you are teaching the same subject from two ends of one long line, and I want to ask you to meet in the middle.

I spent years on the water as a barge captain and as a second mate. A watch teaches you that the day is not two halves. It is one turning. The 0400 did not care whether anyone called it morning. The horizon came around, the stars came back, and the ship’s clock counted all twenty-four hours as a single pattern, because the Earth turns as one thing. I am ashore now, building North 37 Academy, but I still see the day that way. I want children to have the chance to see it that way too.

What our schools teach today

Before writing, I asked for a careful look at what American public schools actually require. Here is the honest picture.

• No one keeps a national count of how many U.S. elementary schools teach 24-hour time. That number does not exist, and I will not pretend it does.
• What we do know is what the standards ask for. The Common Core math standards, which most states follow or adapt, teach children to tell time “using a.m. and p.m.” in second grade and to work with time intervals in third and fourth grade. Nowhere do they mention the 24-hour clock. Virginia, my home state, goes further. Its 2023 third-grade standard keeps elapsed-time problems “within a 12-hour period (within a.m. or within p.m.).” In other words, our children are asked not to cross noon.
• Children elsewhere are asked to. England’s national curriculum requires 12- and 24-hour clocks by age seven or eight, and converting between them the following year. Several Canadian provinces require the 24-hour clock in fourth grade.
• Our children do meet the pieces of this subject, but they meet them scattered. In first grade they observe patterns of the sun, moon, and stars. In fifth grade they learn that the Earth’s rotation causes day and night and the daily movement of shadows (NGSS 1-ESS1-1 and 5-ESS1-2). Around third grade they find the Equator and the Prime Meridian. Somewhere between third and sixth grade, depending on the state, they meet time zones. Celestial and maritime navigation, the art that tied all of this together for centuries, appears in no public K–12 core standard I could find. It lives on in Naval JROTC, a few maritime high schools, and programs outside the school day.

The pieces are all there. What children rarely get is the thread that runs through them.

Half a pattern

Here is the part I care about most, and I want to state it carefully.

The 12-hour clock takes one rotation of the Earth and folds it in half. It gives children two identical circles, labels them a.m. and p.m., and tells them to keep the halves apart. It works for daily life, and I am not asking anyone to throw it out. But I believe that when we teach a child only half a pattern, we risk getting only half the creativity back. A child who never sees the whole cycle has a harder time recognizing it later, whether it shows up in a shadow, a star, a tide, or a meridian.

I want to be honest that this is a conviction drawn from experience, not a finding from a laboratory. I have not found research showing that the 12-hour clock limits creativity, or that the 24-hour clock expands it, and I will not claim either. What the research does show is that children read digital times early and take much longer to master the analog dial. It also shows that they understand the order of their day before they attach clock times to it. The whole day is already in them. The 24-hour clock simply matches it.

What I can say with confidence is this. The 24-hour day is the clock that matches the planet. One rotation is twenty-four hours. Divide 360 degrees by 24 and you get fifteen degrees of longitude for every hour. That one division explains time zones, explains why noon arrives in Lexington later than in Greenwich, and explains how a navigator with a good clock and a clear sky could find a ship’s place on an empty ocean. The story of John Harrison and the marine chronometer is told beautifully by the Smithsonian’s Time and Navigation resources and by the Institute of Navigation’s middle-school lessons. Today it reaches only the classrooms where a teacher happens to go looking for it.

A child can follow that whole chain: clock, rotation, longitude, position. It is one continuous subject, and I believe children deserve to meet it whole, and sooner.

What I am asking of educators

Try the 24-hour clock with your students, even as enrichment. Let them count past twelve without stopping. Then take them outside. Mark a shadow at noon and again an hour later, put the 24-hour clock next to the globe, and ask them where the sun is “now” for a child fifteen degrees to the east. You will not need new standards to do this. Every standard you need is already on your shelf. They are just in different binders.

What I am asking of mariners

You have something our classrooms are missing: people who have stood a watch, taken a sight, kept a log in 24-hour time, and found a ship’s position when it mattered. Navigation is not a lost art. It is a living one that has drifted out of view of most children. If you are willing to visit a classroom, tell a watch story, or show a young person how a sextant and a clock work together, you can carry the subject across the gap.

Where North 37 stands

North 37 Academy is building an intentional K–12 maritime education, grounded in the belief that every child should learn navigation. We do not want to produce sailors for the sake of it. Navigation teaches a child how to see: the whole pattern, the turning Earth, their own place on it. We are early in this work. I am not writing to announce a program, ask for money, or make any offer. I am writing to invite a conversation with teachers, school leaders, and working and retired mariners who see what I see and want to help children see it too.

If this letter rings true to you, I would be glad to hear from you, whether to compare notes, share a lesson that worked, or simply talk about the horizon.

With respect, and with the whole day ahead,

Wayne Eric Henry
Founder, North 37 Academy
North 37 Academy
[STREET ADDRESS]
Lexington, Virginia

Sources for the facts in this letter are listed in the accompanying research brief (00-RESEARCH-BRIEF.md): Common Core State Standards for Mathematics; Virginia 2023 Mathematics and History & Social Science SOL; England DfE National Curriculum, Mathematics KS1–2; Manitoba Education Grade 4 Mathematics; NGSS 1-ESS1-1, 5-ESS1-2; New Jersey and Idaho social studies standards; Smithsonian Time and Navigation; Institute of Navigation lesson modules; Friedman & Laycock (1989), Child Development.

NEED WAYNE: street address; optional phone and email line; confirm the “barge captain and second mate” wording; confirm the subject line; send or hold decision and channel (open letter, email to specific schools or maritime groups, print).

NEED WAYNE: legal entity line for North 37 Academy (nonprofit vs LLC) awaits your exact wording (Oct 27, 2026 rule: no outside-company co-branding on public letters).