The Case Against Summer Vacation (time.com)

Last month when I wrote my “Open Letter to Retail Stores” about stores putting up back-to-school displays waytoo early in the summer and depressing children, one of my friends in NorthCarolina wrote back to tell me that many schools there are operating on a year-round basis, staggering student terms so that some students were starting school in July.  I talked with another North Carolinean about this, and although the economic advantage of keeping classrooms operating the whole year is readily apparent, I know from my own childhood that if I were told I had to go back to school in July, I would have thrown a temper-tantrum large enough to be seen on satellite images.  Keep in mind, I’ve always loved learning, but there is a huge difference between loving learning and loving school, a difference that is obvious to me but doesn’t seem to be so apparent to others.

I think one of my greatest strengths as a teacher is that I remember what it was like to be a student, and I always try to be conscientious of that in my own teaching work.  I never assign extra books for my classes because students need to save as much money as they can, I don’t assign “busy work” or exercises that I’m not absolutely sure provide an immediate and tangible benefit to the students, and I put every effort forward to relate course material to my students’ lives and make it relevant to them.  Too often I’ve met teachers who have no concern for their students or, in some cases, deliberately put their students through exercises that they experienced and hated themselves when they were students, for no other reason than unadulterated sadism.  If I had any say in it, any teacher who did anything like that would be fired immediately and never allowed to teach anywhere ever again.  Even though I’ve taken and taught summer classes, I can tell you that most students need those precious summer months off.

The argument that we need to extend the American school year because children in countries where the school year is longer perform better academically is specious at best, because it assumes that more time spent in classrooms means smarter students, and this is, if not the only way to improve education, then at least the primary method.  This completely fails to take into account the fact that our educational system is in a shambles right now.  If you want a real picture of why young people aren’t getting smarter than the previous generation, and why they hate school and don’t think it helps them in any appreciable way, just watch an episode of Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?  Yes, some of the questions are about basic math and spelling that everyone should know, but many of them are about things so insignificant to most of our everyday lives that it’s no wonder that children are becoming jaded about school at younger and younger ages.  If you want underprivileged children to appreciate the value of education more, teach them about the forces that led to their families being so poor; don’t make them memorize the names of generals and battles in a war fought hundreds of years ago.

Worse yet, the very people responsible for corrupting our educational system have co-opted the language of “relevant education” for their own purposes to turn schools into factories churning out young people trained to be workers and consumers, but not citizens and people.  These days it seems like it’s more common to see a fast food restaurant in a school than a full arts programme, with students getting “valuable life experience” flipping burgers and frying tortilla chips.  The closest thing these students get to understanding the issues around them is being made to memorize the steps by which a bill becomes a law, thanks to insidious programmes like No Child Left Behind whose standardized testing force students to become memorizing machines instead of thinkers, and then they hear a news story explaining how some bill is or isn’t getting passed because of some obscure parliamentary procedure, and then some people wonder why these students feel like their education has been a waste.  In large part their education is a waste, but in typical American fashion, the response isn’t to fix the problems that exist, but to just make things longer and bigger.

It’s been clear for far too long that we need to get education out of the hands of politicians and corporations who subsume it to their own needs, and back into the hands of the people who actually deal with the students and who have studied how the human mind learns.  Even if this were to happen, though, and even if we were to hire the best teachers and make school an enjoyable experience for most students (you can’t please everyone all the time), students would still need that break.  If we want to look at metrics of how the United States performs against other countries, why don’t we look at work productivity and how we under-perform countries where 30- and 35-hour work weeks, and six weeks vacation per year, are the norm.  Even when you love your job, you still need a break from it to recharge your batteries and get some outside stimulation.  Children are no different, and if anything they need more time because they have all that excess energy to burn off from sitting still for hours on end at a time when their bodies are programmed to move around as much as possible.  You would think the empirical evidence of the past twenty years of unpaid overtime and downsizing not helping the productivity gap would convince people that a different path would need to be taken, but now not only are we expecting our adults to work themselves to the bone and then keep working, but it sounds like now we’re expecting it of our children as well.

It’s easy to say that kids aren’t going to school enough when you’re not a kid yourself, or you’ve forgotten what your own childhood and education were like.  Maybe I am romanticizing summer vacation, but to me, that time between the 10th of June and the 25th of August (roughly) is sacred.  That is the time for children to wake up whenever they want, go outside and play with their friends, and enjoy not having to sit in classrooms for hours on end.  For those kids who want to learn more, there should be opportunities for them, regardless of their financial situation, to participate in learning activities throughout the summer, and that’s one area where we need more government funding to close the gap between the privileged and the underprivileged.  Shortening the summer vacations of young children not only won’t fix the educational problems its advocates claim it will, but it will likely exacerbate them because the true underlying problems of our educational system aren’t being addressed.

More importantly than that, though, it’s just cruel to children, and cruelty to children is one of those things I refuse to abide with.  No children should have to be that first group of kids who gets told that they’re going to lose their summer vacation.