Are Summer Holidays Passe?

Watching some of the bored children around town the last week or two makes me wonder if perhaps taking a two month break from school in the summertime is a good idea.

Now before anyone starts burning calculators and backpacks on my lawn, I am quite certain a case could be made for keeping the July and August holiday but research coming to lighttindicates that now might be a good time to have a long look at 12 month per year schooling.

Traditionally, in Canada at least, the school year was often modified to fit the local population. In rural areas where children necessarily helped out on family farms during the growing season the school year might be as short as 6 months per year. In urban areas school years were from 10 to 12 months in length.

With centralization of education in Canada came the need to create a single 'one size fits all' model for the school year. This basically is how we arrived at the present system running from September to June.

But now a new study is shedding a whole different light on education and the school year. This study rides on the tail of a 20-year investigation in the U.S. by researchers at Johns Hopkins University that found children from low-income families fell nearly three grade levels behind their higher-income peers. The culprit? Summer vacation. The learning advantages families can offer their children during non-school months – like lessons, camp and parents who can afford to stay home with their children – are often only available to an elite few from high-income homes.

If we extrapolate that to urban vs. rural divisions and look at the availability of enrichment programs for rural students once the school closes in June we might well find that rural students, such as in Teeswater, are actually being disadvantaged by a 2 month summer holiday.

Add this to the fact that under the present system most teaching ends (for all practical purposes) in Early June and that it takes at least two weeks to re-orient students in September we are really looking at a summer holiday approaching 3 1/2 months per year!

One factor noted as critical to success by several studies was parental participation in designing the optimum teaching schedule. Perhaps now is a good time for us parents to start asking our school boards and the Ministry of Education questions about 12 month per year school years.

I would hate to think that taking a two month holiday every summer might put our children behind the eight ball when they graduate from high school.

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Sources: The Vancouver Sun, About Kids Health, The Globe and Mail