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I did most of my primary school in a private school in Istanbul that existed for the children of diplomats and service members. Daddy was a navy officer. By the time I got back to America I was pretty proficient in French and had learned more history than I was to meet in the rest of my time through high school. In every subject I was way ahead. All that with a school day from 9-3 with an hour for lunch/recess and two 15 minute recesses.Part of the excellent results at that school was that hour lunch/recess. The kids all went outside, grades 1-́8, and ran our legs off playing some kind of team dodge ball. In the first three grades the teacher read to the class for half an hour a day, Little House books, Moby Dick, Dickens, etc. One day we all got sent out on the playgronnd with stacks of readers that stateside systems insisted we had to have read or we could not be placed in our proper grades- Dick and Jane, Alice and Jerry etc, We all paired up, including the first graders, and read them to each other- the whole series from first to sixth. Then we all got "certified" as reading on grade level for the states. Meantime the first graders were reading from McGuffey's readers and by second grade were reading library books at stateside fourth grade and higher level. I totally coasted from fifth grade through ninth back in Fl and Va. And American schools were excellent back then, compared with just a few years later.