When I was a kid, school started after Labor Day and ended before Memorial Day, giving us a nice summer break. <\/p>\n
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<\/a>?) <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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, … Continue reading “The year-long school debate”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1598"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1599,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1598\/revisions\/1599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}