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Do We Need a Longer School Year?
Hugh Pickens writes "Jennifer Davis writes that while summer holds a special place in our hearts: lazy afternoons, camping at the lake, warm evenings gazing at the moon, languid summers can be educationally detrimental, with most youth losing about two months of grade-level equivalency in math computational skills over the summer and students from low-income families falling even further behind. A consensus is building that the traditional nine-month school year might be a relic of the 20th century that has no place in an increasingly competitive global work force and an analysis of charter schools in New York reveals that students are most likely to outperform peers if they attend schools that are open at least 10 days more than the conventional year. What of the idea that summer should be a time of respite from the stresses of school? There are two wrong notions wrapped up in this perspective. The first is that somehow summer is automatically a magical time for children but as one fifth-grader, happy to be back at school in August, declared, 'Sometimes summer is really boring. We just sit there and watch TV.' The second mis-perception is that school is automatically bereft of the excitement and joy of learning. On the contrary, as the National Center on Time and Learning describes in its studies of schools that operate with significantly more time, educators use the longer days and years to enhance the content and methods of the classroom. 'We should expect our schools to furnish today's students with the education they will need to excel in our global society,' says Davis. 'But we must also be willing to provide schools the tools they need to ensure this outcome, including the flexibility to turn the lazy days of summer into the season of learning.'"
Next.
Rich kids with parents that care about their future attend schools that stay open longer. The kids care, and the parents care, so they outperform their inner-city peers.
Schools were out during the summer so that children could work in the fields. How relevant is this now?
[Aside: my high-school started a full week later than ever other school in the district, because we ere rural, and we actually did work the harvest.]
The school year should be 23 months with a month off to scrape all the gum off the underside of the desks.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
School holidays are for learning social skills, learning that thinking/making can be fun and that not everything you do is controlled by schoolteachers.
Its not for homework, and its certainly not for anyone with a chart full of grade averages to cut short.
No.
Public schools are the most socialized, most obvious failure one encounters. The less time my kids are there, the better.
Nt
Leave summers alone, and instead actually make the students (and teachers) attend during the school year!
These days they have so many days off, due to things like parent-teacher conferences, teachers' meetings, holidays, etc. etc. that it's just ridiculous.
Letting kids out for the summer might no be so bad if they actually had to BE in school the rest of the year.
Do students really need any MORE anxiety and social propriety than we already put on them ?
I said it before and i'll say it again. I never let school interfere with my education.
What about actually shaking things up a bit and splitting the school year in half at the same token creating a real nose to nose work program for grammar/jnr/high school students, god forbid we actually do that ? right ?
Kids should get two weeks off per year and it should be treated like holiday or personal time where each student can choose how to split up their time and when to use it. It keeps them learning, it keeps them out of trouble and it's reflective of what they will have to deal with in the real world.
Hugh Pickens. Too bad Roland Picquapeckofpickledpeppers isn't still here to submit him into submission.
Take off the rose colored glasses. Learning constantly for 12 years is hard. Meaningful breaks are very important to avoid burnout and keep morale up. If people want to look at schooling maybe we should reconsider how the school time is allocated but lets not do it from the perspective of 'lazy students, they need to do more'.
I ate your fish.
my kids are in a semester system. one month at christmas off, one at spring break, one in summer... same number of days as the "traditional method" without the big gap in summer. works just fine imo.
summer holds a special place in our hearts:blistering afternoons, camping in front of the TV, sweltering evenings gazing at the calendar
... waiting for October to finally arrive and bring with it daytime temperatures below 40C and the hope that before long (November, perhaps) we can actually go outdoors in something other than a mad dash to reach air conditioning again. Then, before we knew it, April arrived and it was back into our shelters.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Instead of one huge chunk of time, break up the year a bit more with a few weeks in mid-term. They can still have just as much time off, but not in one brain-draining slab. Also, I'm dubious about the "open 10 days more" claim - that study's looking at charter schools, and there are a whole slew more variables there that don't look like they're controlled for in this study. In fact, the study makes that same point:
We should note, however, that a long school year tends to go part and parcel with several other policies, such as a longer school day and Saturday school, and this should make us cautious about assigning too much importance to a longer school year in and of itself.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
including the flexibility to turn the lazy days of summer into the season of learning
I think this exists, it's called summer school.
I can somehow buy that it's not magically mandatory for summer to be free time,
but I also wouldn't want my kids having to go to school every day of the year.
Going to school serves one purpose: to prepare you for later life so you can do the shit you enjoy.
Life is not about spending 12h per day slaving away.
Maybe they should have just like with real jobs that you can take days of school.
We don't need a longer school year. What we need is better holiday distribution. RIght now where I live (Ontario, Canada) our kids get two weeks off in December, one in March and about 9 in the summer.
It would make more sense to have August, December and April off so there are three month-long breaks. That way, there's no long summer holiday during which kids can forget what they've learned. It also makes holiday planning a bit easier on parents; we don't have to cram everything into the summer.
Quantity over quality? That's how it looks to me.
I don't live in the US, but I dislike a lot of things about the educational systems world wide, this 9 month cycle, tests that test memory or test-taking ability and so on.
Looks like homeschooling will become even more popular.
Not to mention charter schools are allowed to expel poorly performing students.
"students from low-income families falling even further behind"
So poor people get dumb faster? That's why they're poor!
I'd rather see kids keep their ~3 months of free time to be kids (if they even know how to be kids anymore, what with their iphones and facebooks.) And attend the other ~9 months having quality schooling.
How is it that this topic comes up every year at about this time? :) Around here we've been shortening the school year. It doesn't have anything to do with educational objectives. We're just doing it to save money.
2 months off in one block is probably not so good. A month off in the summer, 3 weeks in the winter might work better (as in an extra week in the winter). And then another week to coincide with some major culture group's major holiday, or in the middle of each 'term'. Say a week off in october and a week off in march, with school running august to june.
Teachers still need some vacation time, as do kids, and taking teachers out of the classroom for holidays is usually a disaster for the kids. Winter is probably a good time to have time off because kids pay relatively little attention when they have christmas coming/new toys anyway. Not to mention the problems with winter in general messing up schedules. Teachers also need prep time, so you can't really compact too much more and still leave them time for vacations + prep time+training etc.
But sure, overall, kids would probably overall benefit from more time at school, having to reteach 2 months of work because kids were gone for 2 months isn't really doing you any favours. Especially if you could make up that difference by teaching for an extra 2 or 3 weeks.
One of the universities I went to had a week long 'reading week' in each semester*, one in october, one in february, and the one in the summer was about mid july (the summer timing is a bit strange). The quality of work from those students was actually a lot better than were I am no, where they only get a break in the midst of february. The 4 months where most students aren't here doesn't do a lot of favours, but the one week break makes a huge difference to stress/sleep/quality of work, and I would suspect the same effect would apply to younger kids.
Semesters are sept-dec, Jan - > April, may - > august.
I have 2 opinions that fall on both sides of this debate. Personally I do not see how they were not mentioned, as they are based completely in known facts.
1) If school was really all that stressful, such that you need months of free time to recover your sanity and physiological strength, then we should not be forcing children to spend 8 months at a time there.
2) You do want to create people who are able to function in society, you do not do so by locking them away from the world for the first 17 years of their lives.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Another option I'm surprised has not yet been mentioned is the four day school week. Some schools have already gone this route with interesting results.
Our son is going into 5th grade. He's attending a public school that has a 190-day school year with an extended 8-3 day, and they go to school until late July, only getting 5-6 weeks of summer vacation. In compensation for the long July in school, they get a vacation week in late October and another one in the beginning of June that other kids don't get.
For the most part, he loves it. And when he and his schoolmates get back to school, there seems to be less time getting kids back up to speed than there is at the conventional schools here in town. Overall results trend better here as well, and we've got a lot of overall issues in the system here outside of our school. Within reason, I think an extended day/extended year model is ideal for most learning situations, but not necessarily universal. I don't think school should be fully year-round, there should be some sort of summer break. But the 2+ month summer vacation is a relic of this country's agricultural roots, and it certainly could go away without causing a problem.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
If my kids have to spend more time with them, the teachers better be worth a goddamn.
The one missing part is the family of the kids. Families do things like take vacations or trips, or large projects around the home that need the kids to help with. Summer vacation isn't just a break from school for the kids, it's a large block of time where the family doesn't have to plan everything they do around the school schedule. It's when the family can take a week or two for a trip. It's when they can take a week or two to haul the furniture out of the house one room at a time to do a thorough cleaning and rearranging of everything.
And frankly, competitive with the rest of the world? I deal with a lot of outsourced IT people daily, and it wouldn't take much to be competitive with them. Not just helpdesk types, software developers and the like too. I don't want the kind of educational system that makes you better at being like them. I want the kind of educational system that led to being able to "make this <holds up a square filter> fit in that <points to a round hole> using nothing but these <dumps out a random assortment of supplies>".
Movie producers are smart people they know their audience. US Movies are so dumbed down these days that none US citizens (like me) feel insulted to watch them.
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
If students go so far as to regress in simply 2 months after 10 months of education, then its not the students, but the way they are taught. Before we cut the summer vacation maybe we should focus on enhancing education that's received in a 10 month window and make that better instead of adding another 2 weeks of subpar education. Sure summer can be boring, but that's up to the individual child. If you sit in front of a TV all day you are going to be bored, but if you actually got up and did something productive with the time you had off, you'd be much better off. Also, that second "mis-perception" is by far the norm in America. More classes then not were void of enjoyment and learning in my education, and the way the education system is set up today, students are made to work toward a magical number so the school can receive funding, instead of creating joy in learning. We need to change the time we do have in the classroom, before we start adding more time to an already defunct institution.
Everybody's favorite buzzword to justify near-slave labor... Lengthen the school year, but shorten the 'work year'... to the point where you forget where you work.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I admire the self-confidence with which someone speaks of the importance of education strictly through the lens of the global marketplace.
If that doesn't make you feel like a cog, the way it makes me feel like one, I'm not sure what will.
Defining how we raise kids based on their eventual suitability for employment under people who will casually replace them at every convenient turn sounds to me like a perfect way to deepen the chasm that is growing between those people who call shots and have freedom of time, thought and movement, and the rest of us. Being employable is not such a tremendous gift when you must be tethered to the same location 95% of the year, must always sleep and get up at the same time lest you be replaced with people better at self-nullification, and your ideas are only considered as worthy of your time as their capacity for growing corporate coffers...
I wish our economy could figure out a way to hybridize capitalism with collectivism, where it is considered normal to expend some of our resources on the necessities which keep people healthy and educated, and some of our resources playing that other game, of trying to outshine our baseline achievements, for commensurate rewards.
There are plenty of people who would do amazing, truly amazing things, if only given the opportunity, but who never will because they couldn't get a scholarship doing what they love. Well, what about earning a 'living' with 50% of your time, and then doing wonderful stuff the rest of the time (like rest and looking after your health and family, or your hobbies). I only see cultural momentum preventing this, but it is what I hope for. Science, the arts, community living would all benefit. Even the job market would benefit, as more 'half-time' jobs would be available. Of course many people would want to keep their full-time job because they're not sure what else to do with their time, but ...
All this rambling is just meant to point out I hope the search for a more humane economic system is not over. Thanks.
After someone graduates from college, they will likely spend decades without ever setting foot in the classroom. Clearly we need compulsory education for everyone from birth until death. We must close the adult education gap or we won't be competitive with other countries that have shorter school years.
You can have students attend school even 365/365, but if in end you teach them Creationism I don't think they'll "excel in our global society" anyway.
Kids there are happy and creative! Not. Birth Rates are low, the majority of the population act like automatons, and suicide rates are high in school children.
Yes, throw children in an institution their entire childhood with longer hours and days, almost like a prison, and when they get out into the real world, they only know what the institution has readied them for. Bad enough school already takes up a good portion of your life. If anything, school needs to become more efficient and start teaching skills that can be applied in real life, rather than shoving wrote memorization down the throats of students, bashing the same concepts for several years over their heads. have them apply it, have them use their knowledge beyond testing and paperwork.
The reason they start forgetting over a summer session is because it was simply yelled at them, and were told to just write down what the teacher told them, rather than having them apply what they learned (applying a math equation to a real life situation, for example. Having students write a speech for the class at the end of every week, proof read, etc for english, making sure they actually use correct spelling and grammar, rather than correcting sentences every day for an entire school year as part of their english requirements!) and so on and so forth.
This solution just pushes the wrote memorization bullshit further, and instead of smarter, more engaged children, you will have an increased dropout rate, lower grade point average, and children just no longer caring after a few years. It happens to workers too, work someone too hard without a break, watch their efficiency drop, eventually they just stop caring. I have personally experienced it.
Much learning occurs *outside* of classrooms. Learning to be a good person, how to camp, swim, fish, etc. and enjoy life.And how to work, btw. I'm not aware of any curriculum that includes those classes. Are we going to add them in those 3 more months of failed public schooling ?
Our school system has many issues (starting w/ the NEA and - ironically - underpaid teachers). Turning it into a 12 year long death march isn't going to fix it. In the "land of the free", its important for kids to know what freedom is.
007: "Who are you?"
Pussy: "My name is Pussy Galore."
007: "I must be dreaming..."
I might be a hardass, but my kid does math homework even in the summer. An hour in the morning, an hour in the evening as a prerequisite to doing all the "fun" stuff, like computer games, watching cartoons and so on. He doesn't seem to mind too much. That's in addition to private math teacher that he goes to twice a week year round.
Many schools don't have good air conditioning systems, and may resist due to the extra burdens on their utility bills.
..only if you want more broken paperwork pushing drones.
Next question.
I didn't know people did 9-month school anymore. All my nieces and nephews went to 12-month schools. All the school zone signs in the last two towns I've lived in have "12 Month" warnings. Are my observations a statistical fluke?
At any rate, I think summers off are a good thing. IMO being a kid is an important part of becoming an adult. Let them have a break for all those dirt clod fights and stuff.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Terms and Semesters, works well in Australia.
The trouble with education is that everybody has an opinion on it.
We don't need a longer school year. What we need is better holiday distribution. RIght now where I live (Ontario, Canada) our kids get two weeks off in December, one in March and about 9 in the summer.
Just try and convince our coddled teachers to do that...
I'd rather not be emulating second tier systems wherein more time is spent in school. Instead, I'd prefer to emulate top-tier school systems like Finland and have children spend less time in school.
They should drop traditional teaching, which EVERY kid hates, and do like 1 month of independent study for 7th graders on up. That would let them apply whatever field of learning they most enjoy to a real world project. If you're into chemistry, build a battery and solar array. If you like computers, build and test one. Okay those are really expensive but still :-P If you're into history, do a gigantic research paper/presentation into a specific event or research the town's history. Giving kids a little freedom while forcing them to actually use their brains would be a great idea.
I'm a high school senior and personally I think that summers are a very important thing. I don't have a phd or anything that would make people listen to my opinion, but I think the problem with our education system is that we need to learn more when we're younger.
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Teachers like summers off. Teachers' unions control schools. Forget about making any significant changes until the unions are gone.
The LA Unified School District, starved for funds, has cut one week of instruction from the school year; it is threatening to cut a month from the school year if Proposition 30 (temporary tax hikes) doesn't go through. Public education in California is headed into the toilet, and it's taking the students with it.
"Imaginary solutions to real problems."
Kids do 75% of their growing during 25% of the year: the summer when they actually get sleep mostly and also sufficient food whenever they want to eat it. So cut out a bit of the summer, and we're gonna have some short kids :-P Of course, several school districts in the US bumped start time up 1 hour to like 9:00 and behavioral problems basically disappeared, skipping school stopped, test scores went through the roof, and kids' opinions of school went up. Since kids aren't designed to get up that early, it's just because of their selfish, lazy, assholes parents that both work, maybe they should just implement that instead.
How do we pay for this? Many school districts are struggling to pay bills as things are and with their teachers on 9 month contracts. Is there the will to start paying teachers for year-round contracts? For paying janitorial staff for the summer months? Many schools don't have good enough ventilation and/or air conditioning since they are usually closed during the summer.
If we can start actually valuing education again as a society and pony up the money, then this might work...
Who pays for the extra month(s) of school? Localities across the US are already strapped for cash. Increase teacher's salaries by 20% (ish) and things get worse. And when will they do their continuing ed to remain accredited or get higher degrees? Similar stories for custodians, cafeteria workers, bus drivers, etc. In many (most?) school districts, only parts of the administration are 12 month employees. There's also an increase in electricity and possible retrofitting of AC in places that don't have it.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I'd tend to agree. With the required "working groups" needed to review this, and the unions screaming its unfair it will be 2020 before this is even considered.
We need:
-year round schooling (with periodic vacations because kids are humans, too).
-fewer standardized tests (read that: none)
-appropriate homework, tests, and projects
-incentives for grades/performance (pay or decreased tuition, leeway with due dates)
-highly paid teachers/professors
-internship/apprenticeship programs
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
I would be royally fucked if it weren't for the summers spent educating myself on how to write software, how the economy works, and how businesses are ran. A lot of which happened through meeting people in meat space (woah!), along with hours spent in front of a computer.
Sure, the education system did a fair job of teaching me things such as mathematics, and some of the hard sciences, but we need more freedom, not more time spent sitting in a classroom listening to long lectures and reading outdated textbooks.
For the most part, K-12 is ran like a prison. You aren't allowed to socialize with the people around you unless you're breaking the rules. There is favoritism on all levels, of which I have experienced it on both the good and bad sides. If a "teacher" doesn't like you, then you can be damned if you're allowed to socialize with those that have been forced around you.
It's been over half a decade since I have set foot inside of a K-12 school as a student, and my success in business, my process of discovery, and my ability to learn would have been seriously impeded if I was forced to sit in a school and listen to lectures from "science teachers" about how astronomy is a farce, and that the space program is a hoax.
America is about Freedom. It's time to embrace it; both in business, and in education.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Have we not realized there is not one magic pill to boost student achievement? Is a longer school year a possibility? Maybe. Is a shorter day a possibility? Maybe. Will changing society's values on education make a difference? Probably. Will more money in the education system make a difference? Maybe. Will better salaries attract better teachers? Maybe. Will differentiated instruction make a difference? Maybe.
There is no magic cure all, but what people seem to be forgetting is that children aren't nearly as dumb/uniformed as today's adults want to believe they are. Furthermore, their knowledge is spread out amongst a large variety of topics that were not available 50 years ago or whatever golden age of education we want to believe existed (but, in reality, really didn't). I teach a basic computer class for 4th graders (on Linux, for those of you who wish to pat me on the back) and it's always funny to see just how much better on a computer than their teachers are. That's just an example.
The fact is children today aren't nearly as dumb as adults want to pretend they are. And there's no magical answer for improving standardized test scores (which apparently is the only way we can ever evaluate learning). In my opinion, the most important thing we can do for education is quit playing politics with it, quit pointing fingers and blaming everyone else, and have everyone pitch in to be responsible for every child's learning.
Perhaps we should just stop letting banksters skim an exponentially increasing amount of our productive output. This seems to be the root problem of the "failure" that is blamed on all and sundry. You know? When every single thing in society seems to be declining in output in both quantity and quality, maybe you should begin to, you know, look at THE COMMON FACTOR IN ALL THESE PROBLEMS. Just a thought.
Often lost in the "12-month school year" discussion is the primary reason that schools are on a 9-month cycle: the kids are off for the warmest months of the year due to the costs or logistical issues with cooling the schools during June, July and August. If you've ever tried to sit in one place and learn for 8 hours in 90-110 degree heat for eight hours in a room with 20-30 other people, I can assure you that it's difficult.
Many or most of our schools in America were built without air conditioning, and the costs of retrofitting those schools - which may not have ventilation systems - would be enormous. Even for schools that do have air conditioning, they tend to be very large buildings, and cooling carries with it high energy utilization, which carries both a high economic and environmental cost. 12-month academic cycles may make sense for students in some locations, but it's virtually impossible for public schools to scale across the country.
for poor kids. For kids who's parents work all day and have no disposable income (not even enough for the bus). Summer's very different when you're middle class. The War on Summer is just another example of the middle class going away. Yes, I know very well the origins of Summer vacation (farm work). I also know the origins of the education system (training farmers to work in a factory).
What I like best about this entire article is not one person asked why the hell we'd want to work that hard?
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At the beginning of the twentieth century, the leading educational theory, which I believe is correct, is that you don't have to force children to learn rote facts and methods as a chore - that children are naturally curious, and the best education would be adults facilitating children who were, to some extent, teaching themselves.
Of course, in the USA this is in the process of public library hours being shortened while school year length is elongated. Tests which determine the pay of teachers and schools, and which have little to do with students. Thus the process becomes teaching students how to pass a state test instead of learning a subject. Rote memorization. A skewed focus on STEM, even though Steve Jobs, head of one of the US's most successful technology companies, said things like calligraphy classes and the like were essential components to his products eventual success.
I've been assigned to read The Scarlet Letter several times from youth to college - I've never read it, I usually give up several dozen pages in, if I get that far, and reach for the Cliff Notes. On the other hand, books which I have chosen myself I have usually read. There's an assumption here that people only learn when they are in a classroom, 25 (or 30, or 35...) minutes into listening to a teacher drone on and write on a blackboard, after which you will eventually be tested. I probably spend more time figuring out the quirky questions and grading methods of certain teachers then I did the actual subjects.
Linus Torvalds was left pretty much alone to do what he wanted in Finland, and his learning seems to have come out OK, didn't it? In the US, the brightest and most motivated students seem to be forced into the least common denominator of doing the same exact things as students who don't want to be in class to begin with.
Far better than a longer school year would be a longer school day. School days currently are about 6 hours, ending in mid-afternoon, so schoolkids can go to work. That is a holdover from when workers competed with children in the labor market, which is generally not even allowed. Parents who got income from their kids were more willing to allow this new "school day" for their kids if they could keep working them at least part time. None of that is necessary or even useful anymore.
What's necessary is kids getting more time to learn. At the very least schools should give them an extra couple-few hours of supervised "homework" time (better named "exercises" or just more "studyhall"). More ambitious kids who study more subjects could take extra lessons in that time. Or extra time for other activities, especially art, music, shop, programming time spent learning how to express themselves by making things. The longer day would give teachers and other staff a full day during which they can work the overhead of their job, instead of always taking it home with them unlike most workers.
Perhaps most important, kids would spend more time at school than their parents generally do at work, so complete daycare is part of the service, even when parents have a relatively long commute.
We should keep the 3 month Summer break, but simply make it optional. The schools should be in service year round, including both remedial and accelerated classes during the Summer. But kids should be free to spend those 3 months entirely on elective activity. Take a Summer job, take extra (or repeat) classes, teach a class if they're really advanced, or just take each day as it comes if they're not juvenile delinquents. Leaving them to a programme of either their parents (especially when young) or their own direction, even if it's just goofing off with their friends, makes most of them better people. If not, and that shows in their grades, they should take remedial Summer classes.
All this goes for teachers, too. If anyone needs a few months break from unlimited responsibility (with severely limited power) over everyone else's brats, it's teachers. Or the best ones can make extra money working during the Summer session, too.
There is so much to work with. Schools typically are in session 180 days a year, 6 hours a day, instead of the 260x8 adults work. That's just about 52% of work hours spent at school. There's room in there beyond the traditional base school calendar to accommodate practically every individual student's needs. Including those able to hit at least a median education even just sticking to the original calendar, earning control over the rest of that ample time for something that isn't school at all.
--
make install -not war
what about less tech the test and more hands on work?
College is not for all and not all majors / jobs are college material.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/decision2012/2012/08/28/higher-ed-status-quo-isnt-working-republican-platform-says/?goback=.gde_2084356_member_155071793
"expanding alternatives to traditional colleges,"
“The status quo is not working” when it comes to dealing with the rising cost of college, the document says, lending support to new learning systems that compete with traditional four-year colleges.
Those alternative programs include “community colleges and technical institutions, private training schools, online universities, life-long learning, and work-based learning in the private sector.”
and it's not just costs that are that the alternative can have peopel learning more jobs skills in a Shorter time frame With less filler that comes with traditional college.
Parts of the traditional colleges system is a relic of the past and the time tables are also loaded with the summers off and other stuff that is not the best fit in today's work force.
We do need more of a trades / tech track and maybe a college / AP track.
An other part of wasted time in education is all the filler and fluff classes well round is nice to have but how many people really put full effort into filler classes?
Life is not only about what we can produce in our adult years. Adult Americans can produce enough as it is. We WANT children to experience a nice long summer break, because we love them. It is a priceless gift for children.
I know this is a US story but I'd like to pretend to be an outraged southern neighbour and point out the northern hemisphere bias here.
how dare you!
seriously though - things work differently here in NZ. Don't know if things work better but I can say there is certainly no debate here of this kind.
The school year generally starts in early February, and runs through to mid-December. In between there's a 2 week holiday for easter, another 2 week break in early July and another 2 week break in early October. Pretty rough eh. But because our summer coincides with christmas, almost everyone takes leave from work over christmas and for pretty much the whole of January. So you have the kids and the adults having a summer/christmas holiday together for about 6 weeks. Seems to work pretty well - NZ education standards are pretty good, and (I have no data to back this up) there seems to be a reasonable quota of high profile expats doing good stuff. Just don't try and get any help, service, accommodation or actually anything in January.
Hej! Nasi tu byli!
The UK system also spreads it out. 6 weeks summer, 1 week mid term, 2 weeks Xmas, 1 week mid term, 2 weeks Easter and 1 week summer mid term. Actually IRRC private school was about the same, and if one adds it up, about the same as the USA.
As a retired (USA) teacher I can tell you we need the time off! It doesn't have to be all at once though.
It's not going to matter how long you make the school year.. So long as our kids are trolly little monsters who are not learning anything in school.
Americas education systems need alot of shit. Just making their year longer won't change a damm thing tho.
Gut the administration and FIRE all the bad teachers.
Tell the unions to fuck off.
Make the parents financially responsible for their rugrats behavior and education failures.
Theres a good start that will begin to fix things far more than fooling with the school year length will.
Quit treating the school system as such. It isn't. Some parents like having their kids out for the summer. Some families in tourist or farming towns need their kids out of school. Some kids just don't want to learn, so don't make them. Want to help the schools? Let the kids who want to drop out get the fuck out and get a job. We need those people working in the drive through or cleaning vomit off carnival rides just like we need doctors, fire fighters, and teachers.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Just make the year longer. Say, 500 days per year.
While you're at it, make the day longer too. Say 60 hours.
Solves the schooling problem easily.
Also, it pretty much solves my deadline for debugging a slew of python scripts.
So you want of the same... That is currently failing. Isn't the definition of madness doing the same thing over and over again and expecting something different?
So let's take away the only point of learning, and robotise even more and take away the freedom of choice. Then erect fences and lock them away. Eventually coming out so institutionalised, completely unable to fend for themselves because they've never had the chance to see the real world - the out doors.
I spent my summers abroad, and scouts, and air cadets. I learnt to make fire, gut a rabbit and land a plane. More Time free to practice coding, more time to experience life without the clock for the first time. A glimpse into life the way you fit into, and a chance to see you're not a freak, simply an animal beaten by a system. A chance to find yourself and your own way.
Summer hols are a mess up for some, especially for parents who were also raised in a system without a summer holiday to practice being an adult and so cannot raise kids and leave them like in films such as the goodies, super7,ET, for they are not adults, and we are reliant on the state for our every baby screaming need.
Victorian education from the enlightenment needs to more from that era to the make mag/slashdot/TED era. I see the TED talk on education and pupil led lessons, so much more to look forward to.
Like sports the outdoors can lead on to inspire and that includes summer traditionally. Split the summer to more time thro the year, and get them sailing a yacht as a team in force 8 and similar opportunities.
That said my youth was active and now it's ipads and tv. We had a summer sports thing and I remember drinking 6 litres a day in the heat. Got to get outdoors but don't give up and throw the summer out just because lcd screens don't work in bright sunlight currently:-P
A blog I run for the wealth
Look at CS that is Science not really IT work and it's more on the programing side but at some schools you can take cs and have a big gap in programing skills.
But for say IT helpdesk / desktop / sysadmin work CS is big skills gap next to tech schools / learning on your own. Some jobs do say need CS or other IT degree. But some say CS required for stuff like help desk.
Now for IT work and even programing work a mixed tech school / apprenticeship system can be a very good way to get people up to speed a lot quicker (talking about 1.50-2+ years faster) then 4 years of CS + other time to fill in the gaps.
Also IT moves to fast to fit into a college time table and college is loaded with people who have little work out side of school vs a tech school where you have people who have done real work in the field.
Everyone doesn't learn the same, so stop trying to teach everyone the same. I remember one study that found there are 5 basic ways people learn. There should be a program to exploit this and segregate students in groups for different learning strategies. I think in addition this could go further to make adjustments to students learning speeds that should also be based on subject.
When I went to school, we had a 2 week break in May, a 2 week break in august and a 6 week summer break at Christmas. (of course this is in the Southern Hemisphere)
sports the NFL and NBA need to forced to take non college players or that colleges should have a sports ONLY plan where you don't have to take any classes but can play.
Fall/Spring Semester - first Wednesday in September to second Friday in December with a 1-2 week break in the middle for mid-term break to study for mid-term exams. Christmas Holidays - from secondary Friday in December to first Monday in January unless it is New Year's Day then the second Monday - a 3 week holiday Spring/Summer Semester - first/second Monday in January to Last Friday in June with a 1-2 week break in the middle for mid-term break to study for mid-term exams Summer Holidays - Last Friday in June to first Wednesday in September - 2 months and 1 week summer break Separate days off given for President's birthdays, religious holidays (if allowed), Martin Luther King day, Memorial Day, etc. It gives teachers and students more off days but does not make the summer break so long.
brake college up into smaller chunks.
That can be a better fit for on going education, learning new skills, letting people work at their own pace, working a job and taking classes your time table.
MASTERS, PHD, MBA, POST DOC are all big time blocks and are hold overs from the past that need to be cut down to smaller parts.
I think we need a longer astronomical year, it would mitigate the effects of global warming.
"...can be educationally detrimental, with most youth losing about two months of grade-level equivalency in math computational skills" These students never had the skills to begin with. Public school in America is so largely a waste of time. We would learn the same over-simplified crap day in and day out, year after year. 3rd grade we learned how to multiply. 4th grade we learned how to multiply. 5th grade we learned how to multiply. In 9th grade, there were still those of us who couldn't multiply. The problem isn't that schools don't have enough time to teach - it's that they aren't teaching period. Giving them more time would, if anything, harm students by wasting more of their time. Over summer vacation, I could read literature books that I knew we would never get to in class, learn vim, take an internship, or write (usually, all of the above). Public school has already gotten so bad that if I ever have kids, I am strongly considering either sending them to private school or home-schooling them with the aid of tutors. But letting them spend MORE time in public school than I did? Never. Off-topic, something I have noticed as a successful strategy is to home school your kids from 1st to 8th grade, and then send them to public school. This is both so they can get formal credit and because high school attracts better professors so that it is almost worth it.
asia puts to much on the test and cramming for it also they view most school work as group work even when it's individual work.
Now the group work is more like the real work place but the testing part is a double fail as what is the point of test if you can cram and pass but have no idea on what it covered.
as for plagiarism.
* there are only so meany ways / ideas on how to say something.
* why are filler classes loaded with Busy work papers any ways?
Are you a child psychologist or a neuroscientist specializing in child and young adult development?
If not, then I think your ideas about when and what kind of metrics should be used to determine student futures are just so much wanking off.
Parents are important, but this idea that parents can somehow magically cure or change the fundamental nature of their childs body, brain and mind is, well it reminds me of creationism.
People don't need to be sorted and graded like eggs or meat, because people are capable of selecting a path for themselves. The system you're describing is an assembly line. People will never be able to meet their full potential (academically or otherwise) in a system that dehumanizes them and makes them feel powerless over their own destiny. And a system that objectifies people teaches them to devalue their personal sovereignty and mindlessly submit to authority. That causes social problems on a larger scale because people feel like they aren't responsible for their own actions since they were powerless to do otherwise. They were "just following orders" so to speak.
Your prescription for troubled students is especially off the mark. If a student isn't institutionalizing well, it doesn't mean we should double down on them and try to break their will. It just means that they're ready to grow up and start on their own. They shouldn't have to go to school, and should be able to take a job or an apprenticeship or have something else constructive to do with their time (depending on their age). School isn't for everybody.
Why? What's the point? A few more days per year isn't going to overturn an entire culture that eschews things like math and proper writing skills as stuff for dorks who never get laid.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
And to translate you just want to raise MY taxes to pay for the schooling of your fucking retarded poor-assed crotch fruit? FUCK YOU and the horse you rode in on.
Eat the poor.
For the population that uses schools as year-round extended daycare, because ultimately, they want nothing to do with their inconvienent offspring, year-round extended school days are fantastic. In fact, those who'd really like to just hand their children over to the state for "care" and institutionalization should just go ahead and do so.
For the actual parents out there, who care about their children and their education, summer break is a chance to spend time together as a family. It is a chance for children to learn about responsibility, independent learning, and the world outside their government run school -prison. The simple fact is that institutionalized learning stifles creativity, independent thinking, and severely damages the top 5%. It is designed for the least common factor, and falls short of even that mark. More children are harmed by our modern system than are helped by it. Take away summer break, and you will cripple our brightest minds even more.
Were rather excited to start school this year.
Calculus, AP history, AP english, Chem I and II (two boys in back to back grades). When they were taking classes that they "had" to take, they hated school. Those classes were dumbed down to the point a brain damaged monkey could have passed the class.
Its not so much about making the students go longer, its about learning something and challenging the students. This isn't Russia. quantity doesn't always have a quality of its own.
You'd be surprised to find out how important the process of forgetting is to the human memory and learning, and how important it is to let the mind rest and process all the information digested at its own pace.
Maybe at some places, but then it won't be so at other places. I recall my school days in India. By the time our summer vacation started in end of May, the temp. was already +40C and even though the school had AC, it just didn't keep up. It was a routine to see someone faint etc. because of the heat. Hence as it got hotter all physical activities were cancelled and so on. Schools reopened just after Monsoon, and weather was bit more bearable. From what I recall, last few weeks of May, and the month of June, with first few weeks of July, practically everything slows down. The heat would grind everything to a halt, only time you would see activity outside was in the morning hours and then in evening. Although what was very different was that the school year starts in February/March, instead of Sept. (as in Canada), and for summer vacation practically every kid had loads of homework to do, which to a degree kept most kids slightly engaged with learning.... On the other hand. Obviously if there has been studies and concrete results about kids performing better etc. vs. Kids back in the day....maybe we should do that then.. Oh..btw...is it ok once we have had these kids in longer school hours attempts some Math/Science tests done by kids from 60s ( who had the summer vacation) and then compare general scores with the criteria being that kids can only use tools available to kids back in 50s & 60s. Curriculum that is set now, with the some of the rules that I hear about, should be fixed first before we do anything to hours/length of school year. Our education system has taken a nose dive for worse. Yet when you go talk to teachers, they say, "Oh yes, your kid is fine, he is doing great". I can't believe that we have adults and educations systems in North America exploring Creationism in school.....What are these people doing, why can they think rationally and logically. Do these people realize that there are other religions in the world too, some older than Christianity and Judaism for that. For anyone who argues that summer vacation should be reviewed, should first absolutely commit to the fact that all religions are farce. That alone will expose so much commotion, illogical arguments, bureaucracy and politics in the education system, which if all fixed you won't need extra hours to make kids smart. Six year old kids hear can barely write A-Z, 1-200, some better cases can spell 2-3 letters or add 1-2 digit numbers that is it. Whereas in some other parts of the world with similar amount of schooling, they are already doing short sentences...and are starting to explore addition/subtractions at higher order. All this rant... Fix the education standards first, otherwise all we are going to have more schooling, more expenses...yet same old dumb kids.
I am at loss with words...
TFA assumes everyone's buying into the corporate state BS. Let's try to remember that people are not the machines they operate, the are not just resources, and there's more to life than just your studies or your job. This goes double for children.
Programs like Kids Read Now are attempting to stop the slide.
http://www.kidsreadnow.org/
90% of the pleasure of being alive (be you animal or human) is your childhood. why regiment that. Sure it would be more convenient for me to not have to figure out what to do with kids while I'm at work. But the monotony of it would not be good for kids. Phineas and Ferb are all I need to know.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm "Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."
Thus, this initiative. At least Canadian doctors realize a bit more the importance of vitamin D deficiency; keeping kids indoors even more during the summer is going to be terrible for their physical heath. Education serves multiple purposes -- to help an individual grow in human potential, to help someone become an informed citizen of good civic judgment, and also to learn some practical skills. School unfortunately focuses mostly on the last, and mainly in the context of shaping children to fit the needs of 19th century factories which mostly no longer exist. The most important "skill" is to be able to learn from real need and curiosity, and unfortunately that is stomped out of most children very early on because it would be too inconvenient for the school curriculum. Thus we then have the pathetic statements of kids in college saying they finally "learned how to learn", never remembering they were a "scientist in the crib". Keeping kids in school more will only mean even less of that most important "skill" will survive. See also:
"In Defense Of Childhood: Protecting Kids'' Inner Wildness"
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
"As codirector of the Albany Free School, Chris Mercogliano has had remarkable success in helping a diverse population of youngsters find their way in the world. He regrets, however, that most kids' lives are subject to some form of control from dawn until dusk. Lamenting risk-averse parents, overstructured school days, and a lack of playtime and solitude, Mercogliano argues that we are robbing our young people of "that precious, irreplaceable period in their lives that nature has set aside for exploration and innocent discovery," leaving them ill-equipped to face adulthood. The "domestication of childhood" squeezes the adventure out of kids' lives and threatens to smother the spark that animates each child with talents, dreams, and inclinations. As Mercogliano explains, however, there is plenty that those involved with children can do to protect their spontaneity and exuberance. We can address their desperate thirst for knowledge, give them space to learn from their mistakes, and let them explore what their place in the adult world might be."
Public schools as we know them are going the way of the Dodo bird. Khan Academy is just one example of "learning on demand" as a larger trend I wrote about five years ago:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
Pushes like these are just one last gasp of a dying system. Jerry Mintz talks about that here:
http://www.educationrevolution.org/blog/sustainable-education/
If we are to continue to have public schools, they should become a lot more like public libraries -- but at John Taylor Gatto points out, "public" means something very different in those two terms. See also:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled respon
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
so our failure teachers can be paid more to not educate?
Summertime adolescence was the time for heavy reading. "Patanjali's yoga sutras" and "Tantric Mysticism of Tibet". Scientific American magazine (Dad got me the special on microprocessors and here I am), Analog magazine,Greek philosophy (and eventually, geek philosophy). Admittedly, this was fluffed with about 1 science fiction paperpack every day or two, but these two had quite some educational value.
Summertime childhood too, was full of books on dinosaurs and mythology. In addition, I got motor coordination and exercise better than gym class by wandering the mountains near home, swinging on grape vines (and falling), bicycling, hiking, and so on.
So, I say, three cheers for summer vacation. It was fun, and educational. A child not motivated to intellectual exploration will avoid it, school or no. A curious intelligent child will seek education, whether school is involved or not.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I have an M.A., an MBA, and am two years away from my Phd.
I think that my summers, when I worked part time jobs and spent time traveling and visiting relatives in other parts of the country, were far, far more valuable to me than another couple of months of school. I remember those jobs and lessons from my summer "vacations" vividly. It's not that summer vacations are bad. It's that many parents don't properly ensure that their kids are learning about "real life" over those vacations.
FYI, I was raised in a lower middle income family. We did not own a phone until I was in 7th grade (1989). By most people's standards, I was poor.
In florida we spend a week just administering FCAT and spend months preparing for it. We require it for high school graduation.
One problem with this...colleges dont care about the FCAT, not a single college even in FLORIDA will ask you will ask you about your fcat score.
They ask for SAT and ACT scores because those are multi-state tests that politicians cant screw with to manipulate scores.
Yeah because the bullshit nonsense taught in 'psychology' courses makes one an expert in human beings.
Shouldn't we be asking ourselfs why our kids are dumb as sand?
We keep blaming the summer or the teachers but never actually blame the kids. Summer break does cause children to loose some knowledge, this is true and we can't agrue it. However how many users of this site had summer break and now are engineers, inventors or scientists. If summer break is so bad for children then how year after year does the school system turn of engineers, scientist or inventors.
The problem isn't the break, it's the kids and therefore by extention the parents. Don't blame the wrong source to try and pass the torch.
Like they said, it's the same number of school days. Teachers might actually appreciate having their time off spread out more too...
;-)
To me, a break needs to be at least 2 weeks long to fully forget about work. I would think 3 weeks at a time, several times a year would be nice. Problem then is that all the Amusement parks, camp grounds, hotels, whatever will be packed in those short summer breaks and not so much in the winter - it will be detrimental to the economy
Yes, DPS is broken possibly beyond repair due to other reasons. That does not make it a counter argument to the statement about creationism. Things can fail for a number of reasons, but when one of those reasons actually happens it doesn't invalidate the others. Your logic needs some work. BTW, I don't intend this as defence of the other poster - they dragged in another idea that's quite off-topic.
All this is neither here nor there... the big problem is your kids in school and then he's not... and you have to find childcare. Not only that, but THE ENTIRE COUNTRY has a giant break from school at the same approximate time. So the price of childcare skyrockets during that break. Summer break is idiotic and should be done away with on that premise alone. If school is supposed to prepare you for the working world, why not give kids 3 to 6 weeks vacation time a year at let them use it as they see fit just like their parents? A kid that's doing better in school could earn more, just like a real job. Oh wait... the teachers union controls our schools, so we can't ever makes changes. I forgot. My bad.
I guess you greedy bitchfucks want to ruin that too?
Isn't the no school in Summer just a hold over of the Agrarian Economy. Bascially freeing up kids time when they are needed to help out out on the farm. The solution might well be not more school but just redistributing the vacation time.
In Australia we have 1 longer summer break of about 6 weeks and 3 shorter 2 week breaks. Evenly distributed across the rest of the year.
Usually we promote something by saying "it's for the children". But thinking the US economy is falling behind because of our education system is just wrong. While the Chinese are trying to move toward education more like ours, we're trying to be more like theirs and do crazy stuff like "year-round education". Let's not blame our faltering economy on the children or the way they are educated.
I'm all for discussing ideas, but let us not forget that one of the driving forces of innovation is creativity. Until we start measuring that I don't think the system should be changed too much. At any rate I don't see this growing consensus they mention.
You guys have been taken for a ride
It's not the vacations that have failed the students
it's the SCHOOLS
The school we have right now is a "one-size-fits-all" approach to education
No matter how smart or dumb the student is, he/she is put through the same threadmill-like system
No wonder so many students (and not only the students of today, students several decades back also faced similar problems) got so fed up and decided to turn off their brains altogether
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Just imagine being in 20x20 room with 30+ people with no AC. At least when I was a kid(in the 70's and 80's) none of the classrooms were air conditioned and I can only imagine what they'd be like in the summer. Oh for reference the only place that had AC in the school was the front office. Yeah, because the office equipment needed it. Nah, it couldn't be because that's where the principal was.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
> Do We Need a Longer School Year?
Based on the length of the OP's single paragraph, apparently.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Americans need to get it through their heads that less vacation time does not equal more productivity.
We don't need a longer school year, we need schools that actually TEACH.
Not teaching to tests, not spewing data by rote, but schools that impart the foundations of learning, first.
How to learn, how to reason, how to think, how to analyze information gained from ANY source, and use it to make informed decisions. In short, we need schools that create knowledgeable, thoughtful, responsible citizens, capable of making informed decisions, and desirous of such.
I consider myself lucky to be as old as I am. I graduated High School in 1982. With honors, much to the surprise of my guidance counselor, who, despite my tested IQ and being place in honors and "gifted" classes, thought I was basically white trash... on the day of graduation he tracked me down, handed me a set of honor cords and said "Here. I don't know how how you managed it, but these are yours" [1].
Now, why I say "lucky"? While the overall quality of eduction wasn't all that great, there were still many great teachers, who, not having to worry about standardized tests, actually TAUGHT, and I was fortunate to have been in their classes.
Today, many of them wouldn't have jobs in the education field: My Freshman year Honors Social Studies teacher would, by today's standards, be deemed a "bad influence" at best, and subversive at worst: He tended to pepper his lectures based upon the official study materials with cynical observations as to their biases, and it was from him that I learned to "read between the lines", and look elsewhere for what wasn't mentioned in the official histories.
My Sophomore year Gifted English teacher started the school year by saying: "I've a list of books that I'm supposed to cover, here it is. However, since you're all supposedly gifted, I'll leave those to you to read." Then he handed out copies of James Joyce's "Dubliners" to each of us, which he'd bought with his own money, since it wasn't part of the official curriculum, and said "This is one of the greatest works of literature in the English language, and this is what we're going to study."
And study it we did. He was brilliant, imperviously knowledgeable in his field and cynical beyond belief... but, he did one thing that so few of my teachers did at that point: He made us think, and had no problem explaining in great detail why were were wrong. At one point, he was expostulating upon one of the themes in Dubliners, that of self-perception, and especially how such tends to be different from reality, and how many of the images in the stories show that. I don't remember which story it was that we were studying, but, something within me "clicked", as he was talking, and, as I glanced around, I saw another student with that same look. He looked at me, I looked at him, and nodded... there's a description where the protagonist is looking at a copper kettle... and I knew that he knew, too, and he raised his hand and asked "Wouldn't the reflection from the copper kettle be an example of that? It's convex, and so his reflection would be distorted..."... and the stunned look on our teacher's face, as he realized the import of that question, was priceless: He'd never seen that, nor, apparently, had anyone else so far as he knew. He said that he was going to write it up and submit it, but I don't know if it ever went that far.
Regardless, that one moment drove all of us to learn it, experience it, know it for what it was: Life, in fiction created, captured, and made real in words. It was, for me, the moment when I SAW, for the first time, beyond just the words, above them, between them, behind them, and learned that how truly powerful and wonderful words can be.
My Sophomore year Honors Biology teacher was HOT. She also told me that I was her only hope for a perfect score on the NYS Regents Biology exam... which drove me to study HARD. Sadly, I only got a 93%.
My Senior year Honors Physics teacher was as smart a human being as I've ever met, ever. He was in his 60's, then, had retired from industry after selling
Children are not robots.
If teachers cared so much about us actually learning maybe they could start by not boaring us to death throughout the school year.
Is it really necessary to have to wait till college before they get serious about teaching anything?
I have four kids, three are currently in school. They impress the teachers every year when they come back and its simple. For one hour of every day whether we are on vacation or at home they do age appropriate math and writing. The curriculum is free online and they progress rather than regress. The rest of the day they are free to swim, hike, play video games, build models, read etc in short be kids. We always try to fix the system, we fail to recognize that sometimes its us.
There are several problems with the idea. First, public education is crap and already takes up too much time. If it were a full time job, students would already be putting in roughly 8-10 kid-years of work. And they'd get out a high school diploma which most places no longer respect and near-zero work experience. The schools already are in a great position to educate or train students. How about they use those opportunities first before sucking up more of our students' time?
Second, where's the time for long vacations going to come from? If the longest free period of time is three weeks, then you aren't going to be able to have vacations longer than that. That excludes, for example, my cool road trip with my family to Alaska along the Alaskan highway. It took us five weeks to do that.
And of course, this is all forced upon defenseless students. Just another cost of being alive and sucking air that doesn't need to be there.
I think the independent summer is one of the things that make the western world great. It lets some kids do what they want, learn things that the government doesn't teach. A longer school year is a great idea if you want mindless factory workers.
...X.
Some kids will spend the summer drinking, playing video games, hanging out at the mall, etc. But hello bell curve; I suspect that there are some nerdy kids doing cool stuff, and entrepreneurial kids doing businessy stuff.
I am willing to bet that if you do a poll at MIT about what the kids did for their summers that it was not school but something cool. If you ask the kids in jail at 18 what they did with their summers it was probably quite jail preparatory.
Check out the PISA scores for countries like Indonesia (they really suck) yet they have a 6 day school week and not that long a break. I am sure that some of the top countries in the PISA scores also probably have crazy school years but many of the top countries such as Korea aren't exactly noted for their independent thinking. So the question goes even beyond math scores. What kind of citizens do we want?
So maybe it shouldn't be about a longer school year but more offerings for kids to do things in the summer. Camping, science, music, etc. But not aiming for an elite level OCD thing but a hey lets have fun doing
that it isn't funny.
Redistributing the days a kid spends in school, or increasing the number of days won't do squad to improve our education system.
The number one priority is to fully fund the schools. That means pay the teachers what they should be getting paid. Keep the teachers that really want ot teach. Get rid of the baby sitters - those teachers that are just putting in their time. They do none any good. Have the school supply all materials needed for school regardless of income. Furnish nutritional meals to all kids of all incomes. For some kids, that institutional cardboard pizza is the only meal they get in a day. Get rid of half the administrators and their high salaries. Except for a survey of religions class in high school, for God's sake, keep religion out of school. Teach science in the science classes. Teach kids how to think for themselves. Show them were they can find answers in all the reference material out there. Teach them how to investigate and find their own answers. Take care of those things first, and then look at the number of days, and which days they should be.
(How to pay for it? Here in California, help to pay for this by changing prop 13 to just apply to primary residences. Second home? Expect to pay more real estate tax. Mall hasn't changed hands in 30 years? Expect to pay more in real estate taxes anyhow. Get rid of voucher system that just leeches money from the public school system. Would businesses want to adopt a school and donate money to help educate their future workers?)
Having had my share of wonderful, mostly outdoor experiences in the summertime, and after hearing (and living) countless tales of summer camping trips, weekends at the campground, and spending a week with my family at a beautiful lake in the north every summer, I wouldn't dare deny that opportunity to any young person today. I would have balked (read: thrown an absolute tantrum) if the school tried to take my summer break away from me, and I would do the same if the school system tried to take that away from any children I may yet have. Perhaps some of the posters here have a point, that the breaks throughout the rest of the year are too short and that summer break is too long, and simply shifting the numbers a little bit could do the trick; but I never had what you would call an idle summer when I was little. Even when I was at home, most days I was up in the morning and I played with the neighborhood kids in our yards all day. We'd do things like build little forts out of bedsheets and put together silly contraptions from things lying around, you know, that 'pretend' thing that kids don't do much of anymore. We'd chase fireflies until it was too dark to see, and even then the folks had to call us in - we'd just play near the street lights instead. My academic performance, by the way, was well above average and maybe just one or two of my playmates were what you could call slackers. Both came from a much less than ideal home life.
The weather where I live is such that the very best months for outdoor activity stretch from May to September. It's unreasonable to set aside all of that time, obviously, but it goes without saying that the less of that time the kids get, the less they'll get to experience before our long dreary winter returns; That's a schedule you can't change. Given the state of our schools these days (an absolute joke, laughing stock of the western world and not because of our school year) I'm becoming inclined to think that our kids would benefit more from spending as much of that time away from the classroom as possible, so long as that time is used wisely. To the kids: If all you're doing all summer long is sitting around watching television, it's time to reevaluate your hobbies and interests. Getting a life and exploring the world around you (it's not nearly as dangerous as your parents, the schools, and the state are trying convince you that it is) will go much further toward transforming you into a competent and dynamic person than anything you're likely to learn from your school curriculum. It will give you amazing insight into how the world and the things in it function, it will give you insight into your own creativity, and it will help you discover things about yourself, including things you may not have known you could do. Television isn't that fun anyway, and I wouldn't allow my video gaming hobby to get in the way of enjoying a beautiful day outside if I were you.
In Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World', the lower working caste, the Deltas, are trained to hate the outdoors and reading, and spend most of their lives pumped full of drugs to keep them placid, productive, and in a condition of social stasis. Sound familiar? Of course, in our real life analog to the Delta conditioning programs of Huxley's fictional world, the results are less than stellar. Our schools employ every trick in the book short of creating a functional learning environment in the monomaniacal pursuit of producing future generations of 'good workers' whose sole purpose is to supply unspecified forms of labor to the consumer economy. Unfortunately for the school system, the drugs don't work and the conditioning program, while successful in suppressing unwanted expressions of creativity and personal autonomy, does not yield a productive working caste, but instead discharges swarms of aimless and dispirited young adults whose personal potential has been handicapped, not enhanced, by their experiences in school. More of the same isn't going to miraculously transform our schools into a first world education system.
I don't know where all these summer haters are coming from but I savored every moment of my summer time off (even though I was forced to attend summer school).
Let kids be kids.
What we need it less irresponsible people having kids.
No time off from mindless busywork which doesn't, by any stretch of the imagination, prepare anyone for the real world.
No time off from senselessly time-consuming homework. (Why is it that students are given homework anyways? In the real world, your boss doesn't generally give you 'homework'; you work your 8 hours and you're DONE FOR THE DAY.)
No time off from cruel and sadistic bullies.
No time off from incompetent and disinterested teachers.
No time off from the mind-numbingly uncaring bureaucracy of the school administration.
No time off from waking up before dawn to trundle out to the school bus, alone and half-awake.
I'm 33 years old, and I look back at my school years as some of the worst times of my life. The suggestion of eliminating the summer respite would only make an already grueling and unpleasant period of every person's life significantly worse.
Now, there ARE ways to improve our school system. They don't involve adding more time to the school experience. They involve, among other things, tailoring the curriculum to the needs of each student, reducing the focus on mindless drilling for standardised tests, reshaping the curriculum to focus on useful real-world skills, transplanting money currently spent on sports (which should have no place in an academic environment anyways) and other non-academic things such as ROTC into better textbooks, better teachers, and perhaps even undoing some of the damage idiot parents in this country routinely do to their children (such as teaching them that Earth is 6,000 years old and was created in six literal 24-hour days, for example). They also involve treating students like human beings and not mere items on an assembly line, and ensuring that every student is treated with dignity. (The epidemic of school bullying needs to end NOW.)
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
That's when my kids did summer camp (actually being a kid) and eventually got their camp jobs where they worked their butts off for little pay while sweating and staying away from computers, TVs and videogames. We lived at the beach and that's when we made real money. Summer vacations and family trips.
We could do year round schools but they do it in a lot of places with overlapping schedules so that your kids end up with different break schedules. It's even harder when trying to vacation with friends.
I'd be a lot more in favor of extending the school day by 30 minutes.
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Kids aren't allowed outside anymore because their stupid parents watch too much TV and think there is a kidnapper hidden behind every bush.
With very few people still living on farms it is now an anachronism.
Holidays are certainly needed, just not so long.
Perhaps a month off to allow people to vacation is a reasonable length.
We likely need to stagger those intervals of one month across the summer.
Otherwise too many families will be competing for the same vacation resources.
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
The origional idea behind having a (2-3 month long) summer break was so (farm) kids could help bring in the harvest. it may not be relevant any longer.
Finally perhaps teachers will actually earn the salaries they get for -calculate it- working HALF the year the rest of us do?
No need to be humans. Be slaves and work 60+ hours a week, 49 weeks a year.
We are on a bad path.
Robotics are going to make it worse when they should be making it better.
People do not have to work this hard to survive. When you work your entire life away- unless you love working- you basically didn't live. They took your entire life from you.
It's one of the best systems of slavery ever developed. The slaves are all eager and willing to work until they have black eyes and are dying at their desks before they are even 55 years old.
For bonus points, let's cut back retirement programs and make them work until 70 (if they can get a job) or until their bodies are unable to work any more (maybe disability- maybe out on the streets homeless to die an average of a decade earlier).
It's horrific how much our society has changed over the last 50 years.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Haven't read the thread, but if no one has mentioned it, or if they had just adding my experience. I was taught at a year round school in the eighties. We (classmates, myself and our families) loved it. We had the same number of school days as traditional, but we consistently tested on the top in our school district. We had kids from all socio-economic backgrounds represented and we all did very well. We were noticeably better prepared than students from traditional campuses when we moved on to junior high. The effect was still apparent when we got to high school. Our district adopted it at the time because they didn't have the money to build a needed school, but they figured out they could cram in more kids on a year round schedule at our campus. We earned one of the first National Recognition awards in California.
One of the students did not know 8 x 4 is "32". He did know 8 x 2 but, according to my son, could not double "16" to get to "32".
I don't think he forgot that over the summer - he never learned it. This high school is a popular public school in my city many students "choice" in if they are not in the school's immediate vicinity. Even the silly statewide proficiency tests let this kid fall through the cracks.
He wasn't failed by summer but by a school system that allows a fourteen year old boy to enter high school not knowing 8 x 4.
There is noting wrong with summer than a year-round school will fix.
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
you will say we need no kids
coz they are all scholars when they are 6
and you will have machines after 2-gen
No, not the current teachers whose degrees are in elementary education or secondary education.
Let people with advanced degrees in actual subject areas teach. If you want to give the elementary education people something to do, let them be TAs and handle "classroom management" and "pedagogical methods," which is what most school districts right now tell people with advanced subject degrees they're lacking.
In the early 2000's as someone with an ivy league masters in a science subject, I wanted to teach at the high school level. Forget it. Now, as someone with a Ph.D. I'm still ineligible to teach anywhere but at the university level. I have fabulous course evaluations, loads of teaching hours (many thousands), and have mentored multiple high school juniors and seniors into the university system. But it doesn't matter—they want an education degree.
I went to a public high school (three years early, but a public high school nonetheless). My math teachers did not know math. My science teachers did not know science. My literature teachers did not actually know much about literature, much less literary criticism. It was a total yawn. I withdrew after a year, studied on my own, and applied to enter university early. The next year, I applied again. Finally they gave me an interview and I was admitted in my early teens.
What a difference! My calculus instructors knew calculus! My physics instructors knew a thing or two about physics!
One important detail missing from all of the discussions about "good teachers" and "bad teachers" is that no one can teach something they don't actually know. Period. No amount of training in an "education" graduate program can give one the finer details of theory and practice in some other field.
My niece recently took a social sciences class in her high school, and she suffered from the same experience. The instructor was "mainly" a "physical science" teacher (who didn't, of course, have a degree in any science, but rather an M.A. in elementary education), but she drew the short straw and was handed a social sciences book and told to teach it. The result? Read the chapter, fill out the (textbook publisher supplied) worksheets, and don't ask any questions because the instructor can't answer them. (Or answers them woefully incorrectly—something I know since after my science masters I took a social sciences Ph.D.—and the class my niece had was nonsense.)
It all brought back horrible memories of my linear algebra teacher in high school that was learning it as we were, doing the chapter and problems the night before and struggling the next day to duplicate the work on the board for students.
And yet we prevent subject area experts that are interested in teaching from teaching their subjects. Apparently four (or more) years later, at university, the same instructors can be not only employable but great. But god forbid we let people that know the subject actually teach it to high schoolers, without making them wait while drooling on their shirts with frustration.
It's the education equivalent of MBA culture. Only an MBA can run a [insert noun here] company, not someone that actually knows [insert same noun]. And only an education major can teach [insert subject here], not someone that actually knows [insert same subject].
Until this is fixed, no amount of extra days will help.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
In fact, lets just get rid of "School" all together and come up with a completely new paradigm called "Learning for Life." Have children exposed to beautiful and moving information from their first ability to understand language. Expose them to the things that make us human. Let them hear language and speak to children from all over the world. Give them access to all the knowledge they can hold and show them how to learn. Show them how to take what they learn and apply it to the puzzles of being alive. Show them how to take what we know and tease out new truths and understandings from the world. Call that "Learning for Life". Tickle their fancy, inflame their curiosity, empower their search to know and understand. Give them the methods, the tools, the gross concepts, the vital paradigms. Let them fill those contexts with content.
Of course, you'll need to have a race of intelligent, informed adults, who don't mind that their children will be unruly and ready to point out their fallacies and superstitions. That or you can do what we in the U.S. do, we raise sheep. I don't see how a three month summer impacts that one way or another.
You just described the basic ideas of a Montessori school. Looking back on my own public education I now realize how much *real* learning I missed out on and wish I had gone to a Montessori school instead.
http://www.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=3749880
The crux of the problem is most of what we do today is just plain wrong.
I agree with those saying that days off should just be rearranged for a variety of reasons.. one long block is a lot less useful than many shorter blocks of time off.
First, it can get boring, and it certainly gives you quite a bit of time to forget things. Even if it is fun, the thrill dies quickly, and there are rarely many remedies to this.
If anything, in my experience summer was in some ways a chore, as parents didn't have time to watch me all day or thought I should be active, and had me do annoying daytime summer camps that took a lot of the freedom out of summer. And I consider my parents comparatively responsible people.. they just had life to deal with, that wasn't their fault. If breaks were shorter, parents would be a lot more able and likely to take out time for kids and do things with them, instead of seeing finding things for their kids to do as more of a chore. I know on spring break we generally did something, and it's just a week off. Contrast this with summer where maybe we took one week trip (generally not even that vacationy.. just family or something), and the rest of it was pretty uneventful.. certainly the break should be there, but it need not be months long.
I also think I would've welcomed further breaks during the year, particularly as I got older. Stress mounts easily and quickly, and while summer is nice and stree-free, the rest of the year is not. Breaking up the year better would likely help destress students more often, helping them to learn more effectively.
I taught myself to program in the summers. That is now my profession. I have to believe that many children/teens also take advantage of summer as a time to look into and pursue interests/hobbies that end up becoming careers.
I learned far more outside of school than I ever did in school. Learning to live, learning about life, nature, our planet.
To me the most heinous thing I can imagine for my kids would be sticking them in year round school. They are not drones.
We should cherish the gift we give our children during summer breaks. They grow so much as people.
They have much more profound interactions with their family, friends and all of the new people they get to know.
No amount of education can account for this.
So when people start talking about all the learning they lose, I will always point to the greater complexity they gain as people.
All of my kids are much better off at the end of the summer than they were at the beginning. So much experience, so many memories, an intense experience with the flow of time in a way they can't get by the regimentation of school. They actually have to learn to become more adaptable and think more outside of the box.
And in the end... after a couple of weeks back in school they already surpass where they were the last year.
You think they don't leave kids behind in China or Japan or Korea? I think the dirty little secret of all those international achievment comparisons is that most of the countries doing better than us are only testing the kids who got on the college track, while we include everyone in our metrics. I wonder where we'd come out in a fair comparison.
I suspect they do, but the real dirty secrets in Japan and Korea (and perhaps China) are that
b. This means that they cram what's done in the States in ten years (from first grade to about sophmore in college) into roughly eight. They do this by cramming after school, on weekends, etc.
c. Children in Korea and Japan are horribly overstressed and generally very unhappy.
d. Some of the cliches you hear about creative work, thinking as opposed to cramming, etc. are true.
Confucianism has oriented these societies towards test taking and fact memorization as a culture for 1500 years. Societally, they're good at it. But it takes toll on their kids, and it delivers high quality goods on a multiple-choice test, but not fantasically well when you're trying to create something. (Note that many Koreans and Japanese then go on to do well in colloge, learn lots there, learn to write, learn to create, etc. But they do this is spite of the system, not because of it.)
Another dirty secret is that acheivement comparisons between Eastern (or some Eastern anyhow) systems and the US education system compare apples to oranges. US advanced ed. is not about making kids that test well, it's about making thinkers and writers. It's still doing a great job of that, if you ignore all the people going to college now who wouldn't have 50 years ago. Those peope now go to college to learn a trade and get rooked. That's not what US higher Ed. is about.
US public primary ed. (and virtually all Western primary Ed) is aimed at making workers and always has been. It's doing a great job of that, assuming all our jobs include the ability to say "want fries with that?" Truely it is. When something keeps "failing" so consistently, you need to take a step back and realize it's not failing in the eyes of everyone, or there'd be general concensus to fix the problem. Western public primary ed. is succeeding, as far as many people are concerned. They don't use it directly, and they like the current outcome, though they'd like the same outcome cheaper, thank you very much.
They can hire the top 5% from US colleges as the real thinkers and the top 30% of Asian schools (more H1B's, please) to be the semi-clever layer, but they'll always need people to offer to supersize their meal, and the more of those people competing with each other there are in the pool, the cheaper such workers will be.
It all works just fine, thank you.
to the teacher unions and the educational industry who have brought nothing but high property taxes, debt and excessive spending all the while not doing a bit to make little johnny any brighter than he was 10 years before (or 10 years before that or...)
People need to wake up to the fact that this is no different than the so called "military industrial" complex or the terrorism/security industry. They are constantly "fixing" something that is "wrong" to make Johnny smarter, yet no evidence is ever found to show that the changes were a success. Wash, rinse, repeat.
In fact, school days are longer now than at any point in history, especially when factoring in school associated after hours functions. But is Johnny any brighter? Can he do basic arithmetic? Can he read? Can he write (we'll skip what it looks like)? Can he do anything even at the same level as a child of the same age in 1950? Would he score better on a chemistry test? An English Lit. essay? A geometry proof? Sadly, the answer is no. Of course, Johnny today can play Xbox, surf the web and download music though I don't think I'd be going too far out on the limb to say the kid from the 1950s could have done so as well if exposed to that technology - after all, many of them could use a slide rule which requires not just memorization but comprehension to use properly.
We have had fifty years of trying to improve what was already working quite well. Instead, things have gone stagnant or backwards at great cost to every community. Stop the insanity now.
Four ways to collect what we say and what we save
To discard and discover a brand new way
Lots of teachers work a second (shitty, low-paying) job in the summers.
Better be prepared to raise their pay.
When a child shrugs off summer because "...we just sit there and watch TV" I *guarantee* that it indicates something more than any potential drawback to a 9-month curriculum. What it indicates is bad parenting, and/or a lack of initiative on the part of the child. You cannot teach either of those things in school, no matter how much more time you demand from the students. In addition, if your skills regress so much over the course of a summer, then I humbly submit that YOU NEVER LEARNED THEM THAT WELL TO BEGIN WITH. Yeah, I said it. You want to motivate someone to learn who doesn't naturally love to do so? Make something fucking ride on it. Treat these kids with respect, and start handing out failing grades again. I hazard a guess that they'll appreciate summer holidays more. Rant over.
Yeah, that's what schools sometimes are, and the slant of the whole article, while not quite flamebait, is going for the whole "in today's competitive world" meme, clearly with an agenda that the writer will probably benefit from.
This is Slashdot, and I'm hearing the choice come down to "To watch TV while bored or work harder not smarter?!". Is no one using their summer to learn some computing, or form a band, or dig around uncle Joe's beat up old Datsun, or build some Hardware Hack?
Elsewhere on other days the "cynical idea" of paying students to get good grades has appeared, to the shock and horror of "but Education must be pure and noble!" Gee, if they're now saying "to be competitive, let's work harder", it's not noble anymore, is it?
There's other articles out there that say "unstructured time", the bane of writers of articles like this, "is necessary for young adolescent growth because it forms a mental glue that is difficult to measure but is important". Sorry, I also won't fall feed a "Citation Needed" Troll. This whole set of articles is 2012 going on 1981. Why 1981? Let's all intone together! "In this fast moving, high pressure, get it done world, aren't you glad there's one company that can keep up with it all?" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31yxkSIIn9A
P.S. Nothing is ever good enough. So might as well spend a couple month each year reclaiming our humanity.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I'm going to disagree with the quarter system and any variants that have a shorter 'break' duration then that. I agree that a loooong summer break is a bad idea. I personally know I'm losing a lot of information during this (in college and during high school this was pretty evident). But people need time to recuperate after putting in their all so giving them a standized couple weeks off in which all families around the country need to schedule their family time isn't necessarily a good idea.
A good month off is about what you need to recuperate and both in the fall and in the spring time I've found myself suffering fatigue towards the end of the semester. Moreso in spring during that lethargic period before may (mainly due to Christmas brightening things up).
A trimester would fit this perfectly and still give kids a chance to have a life outside of school and do fun things/family things. Japan does this and it works out very well for them. They do a lot of things over there that are quite a bit different from the US (like job fairs and cultural festivals that everyone is required to participate in), but that's one I agree with the most. I know as a kid I would hate the idea of this, but it really is a better system and it's not as invasive as a quarterly system or one that simply doesn't offer a break.
You'd be surprised to find out how important the process of forgetting is to the human memory and learning, and how important it is to let the mind rest and process all the information digested at its own pace.
We'd get more benefit by advancing students on a subject by subject basis instead of grouping them by age. If you can learn Algebra in one semester instead of the 2 years it's currently scheduled, you should be able to do that. If it takes you four years to learn the same material, you should be able to do that, too. Any high school classroom should have a handful of kids learning ahead of their age group, and a handful learning behind. Simply put, from the 7th grade on course progression should resemble a college system where you advance based on your actual ability instead of being crammed into a class before you're ready or after you're already bored.
A consensus is building that the traditional nine-month school year might be a relic of the 20th century that has no place in an increasingly competitive global work force
WTF? Sorry, i want to bring my children up without stressing them from an early age about being part of a competitive global workforce. I want them to enjoy their childhood while they can, because once they are adults the shit really starts to hit the fan. Summer holidays are an essential break for the kids, one that lets them enjoy their childhood for a couple of months. Sure, its a pain for us parents having to deal with find someone to take care of them while we are at work (assuming both parents work), but i think its good for the kids.
And, as an earlier poster pointed out, a million different proposals have been made over the years, and many of them have been tried, and they all tend to fail.
The reason? Because they try and teach the kids stuff. What? Wait? Isn't that the point? Yeah, but how about starting with teaching the kids to learn and reason and discover information for themselves. Teach them how to learn, the rest will follow naturally.
It turns out that US K-12 students spend more hours in school than most of their counterparts in other countries. So, while the 180 day school year is shorter than the school year in many other countries, it is made up for by a longer school day in terms of hours.
My vote is for universal vouchers... let parents choose where and how their kids are educated. I bet that there will be schools with traditional school schedules and others that implement year round schooling, and other models. One size fits all educational theories can be debated endlessly, but ultimately they are based on the false assumption that there is only one right way.
The second mis-perception is that school is automatically bereft of the excitement and joy of learning.
K-12 nearly drove the love of learning out of me. If those assholes try to go to the year-round model with my kids, I'll homeschool them.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
This entire discussion is one-sided in favor of sucking any joy left in life right out. Like it or not, you have an emotional side that needs catered to once-in-a-while. Last I checked, we're still speaking English here, not Mandarin.
Just make sure you take your anti-depressant pills in college and everything will be fine when you end up making decent money and get your first long vacation when you're old enough to not appreciate it, right guys? Jesus christ...
I am an American high school math teacher that teaches at a semi-rural high school that teaches bi-lingual minority students (85%+) of which are poor enough to qualify for free lunches (50%+). As much as I realize it is a total waste of my time, I have to say that most of you don't have a clue.
1. The actual, factual data indicates, in spite of the popular beliefs, that the educational system is not failing children. Schools are graduating more students with higher and more difficult requirements than before (historically). Declines in education came about 2 years after mandatory testing.
2. What teachers teach, critical thinking or not, is not determined by teachers. They teach what they are told to teach by people who haven't seen the inside of a classroom in a decade or more, if then.
3. There is a monumental decline in student skills because of summer break, and the largest resistance for year-around schooling comes from parents.
4. While students get a summer break, teacher do not. The public belief is to the contrary.
5. Lastly, but most importantly, the systemic problems in the American educational system do not come from teachers, administrators, districts, or any unions. All, and I mean ALL, of the systemic impediments to student learning come from outside the school systems.
I'm not going to waste my breath to explain the details of how it exists or came to be. I can say this, For all the roadblocks that are placed in front of me, I teach kids math, and I am damn good at it in spite of the bullshit.
As someone who is in school, let me tell you that this is not the answer. More schooling means more time in school doing autonomous tasks to drill in information that someone three years younger than me should know and less time at home where I'm actually learning and teaching myself things.
Why do we even need school years?
Why not have teachers for each subject at every level. You go up a level you get a new teacher.
There will be multiple teachers of each level(group of levels) and you can learn all year around. Go for a 3 week holiday with the family when it suits your family. Come back to learning at the same grade level.
The focus needs to be on continually developing someone's abilities(knowledge or life skills too) as fast/as well as they can.
Teachers could take holidays whenever too and not be locked to the same schedule, just have to organise with the other teachers of the same level.
OK, competitive with what? Offshoring means that it doesn't matter if you have doctorates because the work you're doing, unless it DEMANDS a doctorate (or is management) will be done by someone a third the wage.
They can do my work and I'll have a holiday.
Deal?
FFS change the record, or at least clean the fluff off the needle.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Really?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
We don't need to 'innovate' , 'change', 'update' things just for the sake of it that's one of the worst trend in 'modern' society.
We just need to have a look at what was one of the summits of human thinking and the people in that period.
What were schools like at Oppenheimer, Einsten, Bhor, Fermi, Heisenberg time? or even before?
Do we _need_ a change? I say we do not. What do we need desperately is more freedom for the teachers to recognize and push students
that are different and more brilliant (maybe in not clear ways and that's what a teacher has to see!) than others in a framework that is open to tests and discoveries and puts more talented and passionate students in the position to exploit and improve their skills.
I'd argue that there's quite a few up north, but I don't know about 'most'. Where I am heat is one of the biggest expenses.
I don't read AC A human right
It would make more sense to have August, December and April off so there are three month-long breaks.
A study made in Switzerland showed that the optimum distribution of school holidays (from a learning point of view) was based on blocks of 6 weeks school + 2 weeks holidays.
Of course it is socially difficult to shorten the summer holidays that much, but it is better to tend to 6-7 weeks summer holidays rather than 2-3 months.
In the USA, there is a negative correlation between per pupil spending and actual achievement. Even accounting for rural schools that lose efficiency due to being so small so have to bus kids from many miles away just to get enough for classes together, it's true. DC public schools are near the top of spending, but near the bottom for actual achievement.
Part of this is cultural - the students don't value their education(and thus don't learn), but there are other issues.
It might help if the money did go towards teacher pay, but we have a real problem with getting the money to the teacher - First you have the school administrators that need to be paid, then the principal. We can't have just one vice-principal anymore at many schools - we need 6. All of which need to be paid more than the teachers. Oh yeah, and a half dozen or so secretaries, at the high school level a dozen counselors. Can't forget private security. When I left my high school, I'd be surprised if there were as many teachers as other employees in the school. It was crazy.
Before we start paying the teachers more, we also need to spend money setting up networks, giving all the kids laptops/ipads, worrying about redoing the sports area, etc...
Misplaced priorities all around.
I don't read AC A human right
Most road-travelling farm trucks in the US are so old they actually qualify for ANTIQUE license plates.* A massively-loaded truck with decrepit brakes and steering; the perfect vehicle for novice young drivers (and most Ag states have dumped yearly vehicle inspections).
* - We only use them 3 months a year, so why ever replace them?
Part of the story you're alluding to but didn't actually say: A few decades ago, lots of high schools had significant vocational training programs. For instance, my hometown had a separate facility where students could elect to study cooking, auto repair, welding, electrical work, child care, and several other trade skills. Since roughly 70% of students do not go to college, and most of them know they aren't going to college, this kind of program is in fact vital to training them for the working world.
Public policy is, unfortunately, the fallacy of composition writ large: College graduates make more on average than high school graduates. Ergo, (goes the flawed logic) if all high school graduates got college degrees, everyone in America would make more money. Of course, what actually happened is that we now have approximately 50% of college graduates under age 35 have either no job at all or a job that they could have gotten without that degree. As any economist should have told them, the effect of everybody getting PhDs is that you'd end up with PhDs mopping floors because not everybody can work in the lab. Instead, they talked to Larry Summers, who was convinced for no obvious reason that the US had an educational advantage over the rest of the world, so they could take all the good jobs and make foreigners do all the dirty work - the US done that up to a point with the really nasty stuff going on in China, but it turns out there aren't enough good jobs to go around.
I am officially gone from
I'll note that private schools in the USA are mostly attended by middle class, even poor people. Most of them manage to educate kids more on less money.
US public schools are in many cases vastly bloated with uncaring, ineffective administration. I hate to say it, but there are regions where paying the private schools to take the public school kids is effective at reducing costs and increasing education.
I don't read AC A human right
I remember reading a special about the NYC schools - they have whole classrooms of fully paid teachers that they don't dare allow to teach for various ways. But because they're not allowed to fire them(Union benefits) without some rather extreme 'due cause', they stick them in a spare classroom. Called them rubber rooms.
I don't read AC A human right
You may take our summers, but you Will NEVER TAKE .... OUT FREEDOM!!!!!!!!
captcha: forego
The NBA does take players who didn't play in college, the best-known being LeBron James. Both the NBA and MLB also take players from foreign countries that may or may not have been through that country's educational system.
I am officially gone from
"Learning constantly for 12 years is hard."
Why stop learning after 12 years? We homeschool. Our kids are learning every day of the year, every day of the week, all hours of the day. They were learning before 'school age' and they keep learning past '12th grade' and so do we. School is never out. We do structured school work, work on the farm, work on construction and then there is just learning in life. The eight hour ten month five day a week school learning environment is totally artificial.
Public school in particular is a terribly inefficient system. Most of students time is wasted waiting. Kids know this. Then they spend the months of summer forgetting. Studies show that each summer they lose a third of what they learned in that school year.
Life is learning. Better not stop at 12 years!
If all we're going to teach kids is that Jesus rode dinosaurs, then I think we should cut the school year out of the curriculum entirely, and just start them building the mud huts they're going to be living in as the neo-peasantry.
Find some way to make teahcing math interesting, and I might give a crap. Until then, stop wasting your time with studies about things people don't care about. I go to my math class, do what I need to do, and get the hell out.
Kids get way too much work and never have time to be curious and learn new things that interest them.
My suggestion would be, keep school going year-round (with perhaps 2 week breaks between quarters), but SHORTEN the day. Make school 8-noon or something. Then after lunch, they have time to do homework while still enrolling in an extracurricular -- a sport, karate, ballet, robotics team, etc -- and having the time to enjoy it. Or parents can opt out of extracurriculars, and simply help their kids with homework or take them to a park/zoo/aquarium/science center/museum here and there.
For that matter, I feel like careers should be similar. 40+ hr work weeks are awful. By the time you get home and eat dinner and handle laundry, it's time to go to sleep to get up early to get ready to go back to work. There's no life in that. Our work days should be shorter too for similar reasons; time to better yourself, seek more training, be involved in politics. And as a comment above pointed out, especially in winter, WHY does EVERYONE have to work/school during the precious 8-5ish time frame while the sun is up?! We need vitamin D! But this is slightly offtopic.
Summer break is so you can plant, tend, and harvest the primary crops. However, since it's been over 100 years since we were a primarily agrarian economy, maybe it's time to move forward.
Interestingly, in Virginia, schools are no allowed to go back in session until after Labor day unless they have a weather hardship (mountainous areas can get quite a bit of snow here). Do you know why? It's called the Kings Dominion rule (or maybe Busch Gardens) - Those two theme parks rely on high school age labor to run the parks throughout the summer, and if they lose their workers early they lose money. And nobody else is willing to work for those wages (and speaks native English).
IMO, I would prefer a real quarter system with four 3 week breaks. That's enough for almost any "vacation," short of through hiking the App Trail or similar. It would be far better for the kids - regular vacations, less boredom, less loss of continuity.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The school year is already a year long - how do you increase the length of a year?
OK - snarky remark aside.
I don't think the answer is increasing the length of time children spend in school in the current form. There are way too many institutional hurdles that will need to be overcome.
The broad and vast set of industries that are dependent upon children being off - from tourism to agriculture.
Enrichment that can occur during the summer - commonly known as summer camps (Scout, language, baseball, etc.). And, family vacations - there is enrichment in an Griswold's style road trip.
The demarcation between one grade and the next that psychology occurs during the summer time off. If you run year round, when does the next year start?
If summer learning is so important why do most (all?) colleges and universities have the summer off? The only students I ever saw at university over the summer were either - trying to get ahead or were behind and trying to catch up. The professors wanted their time off as well.
What I would rather see, than more rote STEM+Reading / Writing during the summer - is maybe a series of 1-2 week mini-camps that are organized by the local school districts (and, yes paid for out of tax dollars) for students to attend. If there are 12 weeks off, the students must attend 6-7-8 (somewhere between 50 and 75%) of their choice. Each session is part summer camp (you get outside to do kickball) but also is focused on a specific subject matter. Gives the families time to do family things. Gives the kids time to do kid things. That is still important.
Suggested topics:
Model rocketry - and all the science camps that can go with it.
Foreign language - French, Spanish, Mandarin, etc.
Performing arts - you can do a 1-act play in 2 weeks - who says you need sets?
Craft arts - pottery, painting, etc.
How to structure one - each session has some sort of reading, writing (journals count), social studies component. The more 'engineering' ones would integrate age appropriate math, science, tech, etc. into them. Add in some field trips, edumakational films, discussion groups, labs, etc. and you've greatly enriched the learning environment along with kept the giant summer brain leech at bay. Something I think everyone agrees need to be dealt with
Yes, these would be graded - and the grades would count on your transcript.
This is the worst study I have seen in years. Other commenters have gone into the discussion with more brevity, but I'll simply say: people need less work and more play.
There are a certain set of basic skills that we need to function and succeed in society. The school system provides most of these (language, math, science, social interaction) but not all. There are other skills that are just as important, such as meeting unexpected challenges (both physical and mental), developing curiosity, self-reliance, exploring new experiences and having time to reflect on it all. Having time off for the summer provides opportunities for this type of learning. If a child is in a sheltered protected shell of the school system for 12 to 13 years of their lives, they aren't going to learn these skills until they are adults, if ever.
Note that I said that the summer offers opportunities for a different type of learning. This requires parental involvement and, in most cases, some sort of flexible work schedule. The way my Dad used to handle it is that he took Mondays and Fridays off during the summer for the months of July and August, which we spent at the family camp on a lake.
Parents just aren't providing an environment during the summer that is conducive to exploration. Kids, today, aren't allowed to go biking to a fishing hole with their friends because of fear. Instead they are essentially locked in their house with the TV. This isn't going to be solved by a longer school year. I'd rather see the money spent on summer camps and community activities for financially strapped families.
The primary goal of the school system and university is to teach the skills that are needed to enable an individual to be able to learn on their own. Once you have the ability to learn on your own, you are in control of what you want to spend your life doing. Don't get me wrong, learning takes a lot of work. Success requires a bit of luck and help from others. Sometimes those contacts are made at summer camp...
about 12-year-olds, long division, and fractions. Not to mention world geography and world history.
Elementary education is great for kids that are working on basic literacy and social skills.
By the time we're into pre-algebra, world history, basic natural sciences, and cultural literacy, you're into an area in which many education majors are already in over their heads and are either unable to convey information that they only partially understand themselves or simply providing misinformation.
IMHO this begins to be a serious question at the 5th-9th grade levels and by the time we're in 10th-12th, we need subject experts because we're rotating through subject area classes and talking in terms of "college prep," which right now is no such thing since universities generally agree that students arrive woefully underprepared and must spent Subject Area 98, 99, 100, 101, and 102 re-learning what they should have learned (or what was learned incorrectly) in high school.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
If Teachers lost their free summer vacations there would be riots in the streets, strikes, and disruiptions (to which the public would not stand).
I think the appropiate quote would be "You can take my summer vacation from my cold dead hands"...
It may have started with the intention of letting students go help their family in the fields, however now it is teacher time drinking mojitos in mexico... and they like those mojitos!
Very much has nothing to do with students and more with teaching benefits.
Why do Americans constantly feel the need to push themselves to burnout? How would you like if your boss assigned you hours of work that had to be completed on your free time after already working 8 hours a day? Do people really believe that school is less effort and stress than work? Must be those rose-colored glasses.
Besides, I think a more effective change to the school year would be to take the three months of summer break, and distribute them through out the year, one month at a time. So kids would go to school for a couple months, then get a month break after every quarter, trimester, what-have-you. Then there is the crazy long 3 month break that TFA references where kids forget everything. And kids get to have more significant breaks more often so they can unwind and relax a bit more between quarters and start the next one refreshed and ready to go.
The best thing for Summer Homework is to do some prelim stuff to get things started now this should be weighted a small but non-trival amount on the Final Grade (and graded with the knowledge that this is before the class starts). The point is to keep the kid THINKING.
Personally i would have some sort of site where the Standard References could be browsed if a kid wants (with maybe some sort of locks to prevent an 8 year old from getting access to the more "interesting" stuff unless a teacher does an unlock)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Part of the issues. All these standardized testing are doing more harm then good. Students did a lot better before standardized testing. Now teachers only teach to pass these test and do not teach what is really needed.
Weren't summer vacations originally used so children could help out on the farm during the growing and harvesting season? That was back when we were largely an agricultural society but that's not the case anymore.
What better way to prepare children for the future by teaching them what career burnout is by grade 6? That way, they can gain an early appreciation for how utterly pointless it is to work as many days a year as Americans do. It's unhealthy, stressful, and painful.
Europeans are much smarter because they take a lot more holiday/vacation time.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
This just in: Dumb jock claims being a dumb jock isn't a waste of time.
As others have said, learning teamwork can be done in MANY ways, basically any others of which will serve far more purpose than being able to throw a ball farther than anyone else (while at the same time ostracizing and mocking those who throw the ball shorter than you). After the teamwork (aka: separating into the jocks and non-jocks groups, because I've never seen a school sport where the undersized, weak, or overweight kids are treated even remotely the same as the jocks) is learned, anything further you do will a) give you exercise, and b) well shit son, that's about it. Unless you're hoping to become the .0001% and get into the big leagues, throwing that ball really, really far will have absolutely ZERO practical value anywhere else on earth. Well, except maybe hitting the target of a dunk tank of a carnival.
Sports are generally done after school anyway, so why not relegate all exercise to after school. Kids aren't exactly fond of going back to class sweaty and tired, so why force them to try to learn actual information when they're exhausted physically?
Spend that half-hour gym class instead learning teamwork with group projects in chemistry, biology, hell, anything else is better.
Schools are already ridiculously over-priced. We don't need a 10% tax increase to fund a 10% longer school year.
I think the effect of summer sort of depends on how you use it:
'as one fifth-grader, happy to be back at school in August, declared, 'Sometimes summer is really boring. We just sit there and watch TV.'
It's the TV, not the time off from school that turns you into an idiot.
When I was in 5th grade, I'd be outside most of the day every day. Especially weekdays. When I was older, summer was for working and saving money. I was NEVER happy to be back at school.
Schools could start by eliminating many of the in-season off days. Most systems could add teaching days within the current school year that would directly benefit students.
If you look at Germany or Japan they are in school 200+ days a year compared to our 155-170. Think about it over a 12 year period and you get an extra year plus of schooling before you graduate and go to uni.
Just get your kids to do one page of math a day for 300 days of the year and they will be way ahead. Never give them more than 1 day off in a row except for sickness. They remember more and are a full year ahead by the 7th to 8th grade. School becomes a review. I chose math because it is the most vital subject and the easiest to get brainwashed by society about (math is hard barbie?). Everything is hard until you understand it then it becomes easy.
It'll never happen.
The teachers unions will never let it happen.
The system of education we have in the US is an utter failure as it is. We have teachers that are incompetent that can't be properly evaluated and dealt with, we have administrators that are even worse, particularly in districts where there are huge challenges. Mediocrity doesn't fix severe problems.
We teach kids to pass tests, and that's about it. They don't know HOW to think, HOW to see connections and interrelations, because they aren't educated, kids are merely programmed.
And we have parent hell bent on teaching their particular religion in school, wasting resources and aggravating an already disastrous situation.
A child that can not read and comprehend grows up to be an adult that is a pawn. A child that never learns to understand interrelationships and history is a child that is easily manipulated. It makes for a fine consumer class of easily manipulable low wage earners, but it doesn't make for an intelligent society that solves problems and develops and builds. And that's exactly what we have now.
No child should ever graduate unable to read beyond a 4rth grade level, yet this is not unheard of. No child should graduate without skills and education that are immediately applicable. Kids should graduate able to manage their own finances, read and understand a contract, and ready for the big ugly reality that is modern America.
I don't know about the rest of you but my kids who have hit 13 and older have summer jobs. Those jobs not only provide money for things I no longer have to cover, they also provide a variety of life experiences they cannot get in school. I agree there are pros and cons to this argument but one con has to include the ever increasing time for our children to be coddled. I'd rather they get some life experience early than spend their first 21 years in school and nothing else. As for the kids whose parents don't let them get jobs.............that's your loss.
Most kids have fun during their vacation.They shouldn't be robbed of that experience.You are probably happier during childhood than as an adult,in most cases. So let the kids have fun while they can.Life is to be enjoyed, or at least should be enjoyed. An old bit of graffitti in the ruins of a Roman city said"To bathe, to hunt, to laugh, to play, that is to LIVE."
They are paid for the work they do during the school year. (And any above average teacher, and most others as well work 60-70 hours per week when you include grading, conferences, in-service education, etc.) [Same, BTW, for college professors]
Many schools allow or require teachers to receive their pay over 12 months (and also a necessity to work with health/dental insurance, etc.)
Most teachers are paid well, many are underpaid, a few are overpaid. (Inflation is MUCH higher than the stated rate and has been for years. Investments and savings (retirement) earn basically nothing - so more salary has to go to maintain these.) But lies like your statement do nothing to help analyze and discuss the issues.
We are only asking "Do We Need A Longer School Year" because schools are run by the government. If schooling were free market based, that question would be like asking "Do we need a bigger container size for milk?", and the answer would be that parents could choose whatever kind of school they want.
Or are you just completely anti-science and anti-medicine?
Sure, psychology (and psychiatry) has many issues, false starts, and blind alleys. As did physics in Aristotle's day. Psychology is a very young field of study.
Human body/brain/mind is much more complicated than say physics: requires several levels of understanding ABOVE physics. Physics is just the baseline. And no, the answer is not analyzing/modelling everything from a complete understanding of physics - that is an intractable problem, so we use the heuristics of medicine, psychiatry, and yes: psychology.
The point is that specialists and experts do have more insight than the average person, and just because there are issues in a field does not mean it can or should be completely dismissed.
Life ain't black and white.
Who are these supposed people that are lazily lounging around in summer? The unemployed? Seriously who has time to have fun during the summer when you work for a living?
Slashdot needs a -1 lies moderation.
Or perhaps -5 lies.
ironic captcha: vigilant
I spoke with a police chief of a large city who said that three weeks after summer break vandalism and crime rose sharply and continued until school started. His believe was that three weeks of nothing structured to do increased the likelihood of less than desirable creative outlets for adolescents.
I vote year round schools.
Teacher- 20 years
Summer is also a time when a lot of the renovations/work on the schools themselves get done. Just because the teachers aren't in doesn't mean the maintenance people aren't.
Ducting. Cabling. Carpentry. Parking lot resurfacing. Playground construction. Grass seeding. Computer/lab replacement+upgrades.
There's lots of stuff that gets done that's pretty hard to do in regular hours of a school year without causing some fairly major disruption.
School is not about earning a living and that is not even a legitimate consideration. If it were we would have zero poets, zero astronomers and zero philosophers. When was the last time anyone saw a help wanted ad for poets wanted?
About 1970 colleges got all scrambled and we started to lose the concept of colleges and instead we had white collar trade schools. It has not worked out well at all.
For the future computers will replace brain labor in the work place and robots will replace physical labor. We are well on the road to non-human industry and services. There will be a fragment of society that enjoys working and we will see a bit of human labor and creativity but in essence we will all be getting checks from the government and people will spend those checks where they please which means that automated businesses will compete for our money and be taxed to support the government. An automated car wash will need no owners for example. An automated pizza joint will need no employees or owners at all. The computer boss of the business will retain a percentage of profits dedicated to advancing and replacing technology to make the business more competitive.
Right now the next trade to vanish will be drivers of trucks and taxis and the like. There are already automated vehicles on American roads. Think about it. We know it works. How long before our cars will drive themselves and record their every move. Drive by shootings and wrecks would virtually cease to exist as would drunk driving.
The profound changes already taking place are rarely noticed by the population.
There are two themes. Days per year of education and school break schedule.
I'm a big fan of "year-round" school schedules for K-12, but think higher education works best with a long summer break. In the US, a year-round schedule is typically the same number of days as the traditional schedule; about 180 days. In many Asian countries, it's 240-250 days per year. US and EU have seasonal farming. Prior to the industrial revolution, having the kids home for 3-4 months during the growing season made sense, but not anymore.
K-12:
* There should be 200+ days of free socialized education (increase from the current 180 days)
* A typical K-12 year-round vs. traditional school schedule looks like this:
http://www.nayre.org/calendar_comparison.htm
* My father was a Superintendent of Schools in the Los Angeles area. He converted K-8 to year-round largely because the majority Hispanic population would return to Mexico around Christmas for several weeks and the schools would loose crucial ADA funds. It also keeps kids from regressing in their learning over long breaks.
Higher Ed:
* Keep the
* Keep the 3 month summer holiday. Summer jobs and Internships are critical for the development, and often finances, of young adults.
* There is more choice in accreditation and schedule for higher ed.
I continue my father's mission by financially supporting year-round school lobby orbs. Personally, we are still on a traditional school schedule with our two elementary kids, but would prefer a year-round schedule. We like to take time off and travel for 1-2 months a year with the kids. The year-round schedule helps space out the travel.
There is really no point in high school sports, and even less in middle school sports.
Can you show one single study that backs this up? There are lots of studies (one http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/highschool-prep-rally/study-shows-school-sports-improve-grades-while-more-221934443.html) that show sports improves grades. I learned more about hard work and perseverance playing sports than sitting in a classroom. That ability to focus and keep working with others give up has served me well over the years. Often in life it is the fact that you don't quit that is much more important than ability, intelligence, or economic background. Sports teaches that in a way that no classroom activity will every convey.
Did you know that the percentage of overweight children and adolescents in the US has nearly tripled since the early 1970’s? More than one in five children between the ages of 6 and 17 are now considered overweight. The lack of physical education (and sports) is going to cost us billions in medical expenses because our children believe like you. Save a little by cutting sports or pay billions later.
Few public schools have much of interest to the gifted student. Keeping those students in school longer will just take away time from the real education they can only get outside school: dance instruction, piano practice, independent reading, computer programming, etc. We already waste much of the time of the best and brightest in a vain attempt to teach impractical subjects to the uninterested.
Did you know that the percentage of overweight children and adolescents in the US has nearly tripled since the early 1970’s? More than one in five children between the ages of 6 and 17 are now considered overweight. The lack of physical education (and sports) is going to cost us billions in medical expenses because our children believe like you.
In destroy your point in your own post.
There IS NO LACK of physical education, by law, in the US over that same time span. Yet obesity continues to increase. So while every student has been in gym class all these years it hasn't helped.
Had you paid as much attention in biology as you did at practice, you would have learned that you simply can't exercise weight away without changing diet. No amount of jumping jacks will make up for two bowls of Apple Jacks, or a burger and fries for lunch every day at Jack-in-the-Box.
Note that physical education classes are really not the issue here.
Competitive inter-school football, basketball, hockey programs are what this thread is about.
Gym class is cheap, arguably effective. Competitive sports are a waste of money, except where its used as a means of making money. And when is is used that way, it often becomes corrupt.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I disagree. We have GATE kids and our school day is 8am-2pm and one "half day". That gives plenty of time for our half dozen outside activities, independent reading and play time. 300 days a year is too much, but 180 is not enough.
The economy is more important than children, right? We all believe it - prove I'm not right! Now, remember how poor people sometimes used to "sell" one or two kids into servitude as an economic strategy? Well, let's go one better than those old fogies - let's turn ALL our children into marketable commodities! Plus, we get an added benefit. Slavery is so lame - you still have to think of the slaves as a _type_ of human. But as _commodities_, they aren't human at all! In one move, we're free of them, _some_ of us can make more money, and we can all get back to our lives! So don't waste any more time. Let's harvest this wonderful national economic resource for the good of all of us adults, _and_ at the same time help the kids be all that they can be - er, all that we will _let_ them be - so long as it doesn't disturb our economic projections!
there is a political party which intends to eliminate public schools. then you will have an option to get all the education you can afford.
Who will help the parents bring in the summer crops if they kids are in school????
"And you only need five minutes of sun light to completely restore vitamin D levels in the body. kids stand outside waiting on the bus longer than that."
I know that is what we have all been taught in school in past years. The problem is it is not true. Following that advice will lead to severe health problems. Here are better recommendations:
http://www.grassrootshealth.net/recommendation
The following is closer to the truth, based roughly on what Dr. John Cannell writes on his website:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/about-us/our-staff0/john-j-cannell-md/john-cannell/
For a light skinned adult human in a (skimpy) bathing suit under peak noon-day sun, that person will produce about 20,000 IU vitamin D (about 30X the US RDA) in about twenty minutes. For someone with dark skin, that will take two to four hours in a bathing suit. Any excess vitamin D beyond that will be broken down into other compounds that we don't yet fully understand the significance of (but may have health value). Meanwhile, the body slowly charges its fat soluble stores of vitamin D. But you may need to do that for months to saturate the body to the point where it will have a six to nine months supply (maybe longer or shorter) where you could go the winter without supplements.
For about half the year in more Northern latitudes, your body will not make any vitamin D at any time of day because the angle of the sun through the atmosphere means too much UV-B is absorbed for it to have much affect on your skin. Similarly, outside of peak sun hours, there is much less vitamin D produced.
So, while I was taught the same thing you said growing up, that even in winter your face or hands would produce enough vitamin D to get by, it just is not true. And that has serious implications. For example:
"Blacks more likely to die from cancer because of vitamin D deficiency, study finally admits"
http://www.naturalnews.com/036181_blacks_vitamin_D_deficiency_cancer.html
And also:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/neurological-conditions/autism/introduction/
And on top of that, dermatologists and those who would sell cosmetics and sun screens scare people about sun exposure without telling them to supplement with vitamin D if they avoid the sun. And even if they told them to supplement, the US RDA is about ten times too low for adults (and in any case, you need a blood test to be sure of levels as different people respond differently to supplements). For children the RDA is also fairly low. For infants the RDA is OK. Basically, the RDA is almost the same for all these ages, but since vitamin D needs correspond somewhat to weight, that is why the child and adult levels are too low.
Conflict-of-interest is one reason the US government RDAs and other nutritional recommendations are often (but not always) so wrong, as discussed here with the USDA's recent absurd recommendations to eat meat every day:
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/news-usda-dont-go-meatless-not-even-one-day-a-week.html
So that is why keeping kids indoor more will destroy their health (unless they take supplemental vitamin D, and even then, we don't fully understand all the supplementation issues). Many schools have already removed recess outdoors in order to have more time for in-chair paper-pushing academic work, and yet ironically the lack of exercise and sunlight may have decreased test scores as it decreases a child's general physical and mental health.
"Schools are not going anywhere. The need for social interaction while learning is common to all peop
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Not long ago I ran into a man who was a teacher of mine many years ago. He is now an education professor. He thinks that the schools are focused on the wrong issues. He says we need better teachers, more accountability and a more challenging curriculum. The length of the school year or the length of the school day is not relevant. He still backs summer vacations.
Considering the sad shape of education in this country...
9 months of poor classroom ratios, excessive homework and eliminating PT and focusing on rote learning standardized tests? No, we do not need more of the same, and yes - children do need time to be children.
These comments don't surprise me though. Competence isn't what seems to attract individuals to a career in decisionmaking in public educational systems.
"No good deed goes unpunished"
If the hypothesis is "students suffer after a two-month break", how do we explain the current post-secondary strategy of *four* month breaks?
Does anyone know of a university or college that runs a full-year curriculum (besides the "hey, we'll let you take a couple classes over the summer" that the ones I know about do)?
We need less time in school and time off to be more spread out.
http://www.educationrevolution.org/
Great points; thanks! That's why I feel we need something like a "basic income" so individuals and communities have the time and resources they need to bloom.
On competition and cooperation, from: http://www.shareintl.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm
=====
"We need competition in order to survive."
"Life is boring without competition."
"It is competition that gives us meaning in life."
These words written by American college students capture a sentiment that runs through the heart of the USA and appears to be spreading throughout the world. To these students, competition is not simply something one does, it is the very essence of existence. When asked to imagine a world without competition, they can foresee only rising prices, declining productivity and a general collapse of the moral order. Some truly believe we would cease to exist were it not for competition.
Alfie Kohn, author of No contest: the case against competition, disagrees completely. He argues that competition is essentially detrimental to every important aspect of human experience; our relationships, self-esteem, enjoyment of leisure, and even productivity would all be improved if we were to break out of the pattern of relentless competition. Far from being idealistic speculation, his position is anchored in hundreds of research studies and careful analysis of the primary domains of competitive interaction. For those who see themselves assisting in a transition to a less competitive world, Kohn's book will be an invaluable resource.
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Still, it is also true that male college students are of an age where competition for mates is a big deal, whereas older males at least tend more towards cooperation. But like James P. Hogan talks about in the sci-fi novel "Voyage From Yesteryear", we can as a society at least redirect competitive urges into more socially productive ends.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
My main concern (in my sig) is that modern day technologies of abundance (biotech, nanotech, nuclear, robotics) make such formidable weapons (used to fight over perceived scarcity instead of to bring abundance) compared to the scale of the Earth that we need to create a more cooperative egalitarian society just to survive the 21st century. As well as move into space to hedge our bets. :-) And even currenltly materially wealthy individuals will be better off for it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level:_Why_More_Equal_Societies_Almost_Always_Do_Better
http://www.livableincome.org/amillionairegli.htm
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.