It's a perception thing --- a given period of time is related to one's total life experience/recent memory --- to a toddler, a week is a long time because at that age one cannot remember many weeks and the weeks which one remembers are full of new experiences each of which is vivid and fresh, while to a person in middle age, there are many, many weeks accumulated into many repeated years, and the experiences are much the same and repeated.

The big thing which we need to change and solve is education --- I have memories of going to a school in Mississippi which my perception of was that it was quite well run, and that classes in it were divided between academic and social --- social classes were attended at one's age level, while academic classes were attended at one's ability level (4 grade cap up through 8th grade) and that students who progressed beyond high school courses were able to take college courses, some teachers being accredited as faculty at a local college, or instructors from that institution being brought to the school for classes at need.

Maybe AP classes offer a similar facility in public school systems? Though one wants to cue the _Doonesbury_ cartoon of the college dean who after being told that his entire Freshman class is taking remedial 051 level _everything_ is running a glorified pre school.

Roger Zelazny made much of college education becoming quite a different thing when Samuel Eliot of Harvard made the conceptual leap of dividing education by the college credit hour and allowing customization beyond the rote repetition of previous generations in his wonderful novel _Doorways in the Sand_ --- perhaps that should be extended down on some sort of skills basis? The school I attended after Mississippi did reading with a pair of boxes of Scholastic Reading Assessment (SRA) booklets, which, not understanding that one was supposed to do a two or three at each level and get approval on before moving to the next level, I did _all_ of in a matter of weeks, which left me with nothing to do for the balance of the school year but go to the (meager) elementary school library.