When I was a kid, school started after Labor Day and ended before Memorial Day, giving us a nice summer break.
This morning, coming home from my jog, I saw kids waiting for the bus. And it’s not Labor Day yet! (What happened to Gov. Hogan’s Universal School Start Act of 2020?)
Throughout my life, there’s been a move to expand the school year — starting earlier and ending later — and there’s been grumbling about how dumb kids get over summer. They forget a lot of what they learned the previous year. Also, American kids are falling behind kids from other nations, and some people blame this (in part) on the summer break. So some teachers would rather not have a summer break at all.
After all, the summer break is a leftover from an agricultural society where children were needed at home to help on the farm. We don’t live in that world any more. The percentage of people involved in agriculture has dropped precipitously (from something like 50% in 1870 to less than 2% today), and children aren’t that involved anyway.
Those arguments make some good points, but I like school-free summer. I think it’s good to have down time, and I’ve always resented the effort to get rid of summer break.
But maybe we have an easy solution to this debate. For the last 18 months, the education establishment has been telling us that virtual learning is just as good as in-person learning. So, if the problem is that kids forget over the summer much of what they learned the previous year, one possible solution would be to have some minimal online learning over the summer.
Not that it would have been possible when I was a kid, but I think I could have fit in an hour a day between swim team, fishing, mowing lawns, listening to music, riding my bike, and goofing off with friends.
It’s not an airtight argument, but one thing I have always wondered about year-long school is, when are families supposed to go on vacation? Or kids generally do things for an extended period of time (camp, community sports, long visits to Grandma, etc.) that are not school? The problem with year long school is that, while there are advantages to not having large gaps in education, there are huge disadvantages to having kids never not be doing school for any significant stretch of time.
As for the vacation thing, the answer is usually something like, “there will be school breaks, they’ll just be shorter and more often.” Yeah, but all the families will be squeezing vacations into those more limited, more defined breaks, which will cause madness at vacation destinations and issues at parents’ workplaces, instead of having a 2 1/2-3 month period during which those vacations will be spread out.
Again, I realize this doesn’t necessarily defeat all other arguments, but I think it is a legitimate consideration. Families need time to spend extended time together, and kids need to have memorable chunks of their lives not dominated by the classroom.
Yes, those are good points.
There are legitimate educational concerns — like forgetting things over a long break — but sometimes it sounds more like it’s about control. “We should decide how your kids are trained,” etc. A lot of the Covid-related debates made that very clear.
When I was a kid, it was after labor day until about June 10 was school. Something about having to be 180 days of classroom time.
I had some cousins that were in year round school. They’d go to school for so long and then get a 2-week break. Then repeat. Michigan was heavily RC (at least my area) and generally we’d get the week after Easter as our spring break starting with Good Friday the day before.
Here in Oklahoma, they start about August 18-20 and go to before Memorial day.
In Michigan, late August is more enjoyable / better weather than early June–water better for swimming. Here in Oklahoma, early June is definitely better than late August–just too hot.
That’s a good point about regional variations, and a good reason why there should not be national standards on such things.
Another thing is that while the practical advantages (it’s better for kids not to have large gaps in their education because they lose ground) are the arguments made out loud, a lot of this is driven by the fact that school functions as free daycare for school aged kids, and that usually isn’t said out loud. Having school year round means the kids are being watched year round. That’s a legitimate issue for a lot of people, and I don’t really have an answer for how to deal with that otherwise, but I wish that the debate was a bit more forthright about that. If you want year round school because you want someone to watch your ten year old all summer for free, just say so.
“School as babysitting” is certainly part of the issue.