Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Asks: Should Schooling Be Year-Round?
Around the world, American schools' long summer break is viewed as an anomaly, and the long summer seems to be getting shorter. While most American primary and secondary schools used to start after Labor Day, more and more of them now open sometime in August (and that's not counting the ones that have gone to a year-round schedule). Some of my younger relatives started a new school year last week (in Indiana), while Baltimore schools start later this month. Both Seattle and Portland's kids have until after Labor Day (with start dates of the 3rd and 4th of September, respectively). The 4th is also the start date for students in New York City's public schools, the country's largest district. Colleges more often start in September, but some get a jump start in August, especially with required seminars or orientation programs for new students. Whether you're in school, out of school, or back in school by proxy (packing lunches or paying tuition), what time does (or did) your school-year start? Would you prefer that your local public schools run all year round, if they're of the long-summer variety? (And conversely, if your local schools give short shrift to summer, whether that's in the U.S. or anywhere else, do you think that's a good idea?)
Kids should have at least a couple of months out of the year when they can just not worry about their studies and have fun and BE KIDS.
I mean, jeez! You only get to be a kid once. Let them enjoy those summer vacations. When I think back to my childhood, my fondest memories are during those summer vacations! Why the heck should we take that away from our future generations?
Leave summer vacation in place. And stop freaking shortening it.
Who cares to even read the titles anymore?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
One thing that gets missed in this whole year-round school debate is: when is the school going to have time for major maintenance, repairs, and renovations? Many schools are already packed through to the brim (in terms of classroom capacity) so it's not like they can close down an area of the campus/building to get work down while class is in session; construction noise and construction zone safety are major factors too. Ever been on the floor above when a construction worker is using an impact driver into a wafer ceiling?? If you have, you have probably noticed it's louder and more annoying noise for you that for the construction worker. On the safety side, do you really think it's a wise idea to do a crane lift of a large HVAC unit while there are unwatchful, unrulely, or apathetic students down below?
Schooling as we know it has become industrialized
Young children becomes the raw input
Teachers / administrators become the robotic hands to turn screws
Textbooks and all other teaching aids become the paint / lubrication
And out goes the finished product - something that has all its innate creativities and curiosity wiped
The industrialized schooling method might have worked in the 18th, 19th or even the 20th century but in the 21st century and beyond, what the world needs are human beings capable to tap into their FULL POTENTIALS, not some drones regurgitating whatever they have been programmed with
When I have children, I will do everything in my power to keep them out of school as much as possible. They will learn far more by just idly dicking around at a library. Our pedagogy is a terrible joke, and even good teachers' efforts are wasted due to the poisonous atmosphere created by forcing a heterogenous population of few thousand stressed and bored children to spend several hours a day together.
Year round in a high security school where firearms are confiscated and teachers try to stay alive rather than teach: NO Year round don't you dare take your child out of school or we'll throw you in prison: NO Year round schooling where creativity and rational logical thought is taught: YES
And that pretty much sums up why we homeschooled our two, who ended up with full scholarships to the state U for their efforts. Did we make them sit at a desk 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year? Of course not. We took vacations whenever the heck we wanted, we let them stop whenever they had demonstrated understanding of the day's lesson (average time: 2 hours a day doing schoolwork), and we shut down just about the entire month of December to accomodate visiting relatives, Christmas parties and other activities, and playing in the snow.
Of course, the subtitle of the TFS ("from the home-schooling-never-stops dept.") is exactly right. For (good) homeschoolers, EVERYTHING is a learning opportunity. For the little 'uns, sounding out words in the grocery store or learning to identify different animals. For the older students, anything from existentialism to comparitive religion to politics on any level to physics to algebra to constitutional law to history to classic literature to an assortment of foreign languages, theater, music history... you never know what may come up in the course of a day while we go about our lives.
Summer vacation has an effect size of d=.02 on learning, which is not good. .4 = 1 year of growth
http://ibiologystephen.wordpre...
But here is the deal, the longer we stop doing something, the less proficient we are at doing it. Think balancing a chemical equation in chemistry or solving the a Lorentz time dilation problem in physics, or remembering the plot of Snow White (assuming you haven't seen in 10 years).
Sure kids forget, we all do, but it is easy to dive back in and strengthen those memories with review, just like exercising a muscle.
To me the point of education should be this, teach kids to love learning, be curious, and learn how to learn. As a teacher, if you have done this, you have done your job. The goal of teaching is not to turn kids into homework machines that suck the life out of them so they can perform on the standardized test, all the while making them hate school and learning. Anything you learn today is obsolete in less than 4 years anyway and many things forced on kids in schools via state standard wish-lists are useless.
Childhood is a precious time where we learn lots and lots of stuff without sitting quietly in a desk. We build, we play, we explore the world, we ride bikes, dance, sing, play with dad's tools, and make all sorts of discoveries which aren't covered on standardized tests.
So it comes down to this, do we want study machines or children? Ask the children in South Korea.
Scroll down, school is like prison.
http://www.ashesthandust.com/t...
In North Carolina, USA, There was a surprising opponent to year-round schooling. It was the tourism industry.
This is from a Norwegian perspective, so anything here may or may not apply to the US. Here in Norway the three last weeks of July are extremely common to take vacation in, it's known as the "fellesferie" = "common vacation". It's a leftover from when many industries literally stopped in the summer, with the exception of those doing maintenance/upgrades. Basically where it's hard to run with half the staff, everyone gets the the same forced vacation. There's a huge network effect so everything is closed/on skeleton crew because everything else is too. What it practically means though is that every vacation resort or activity is crowded and overbooked, prices are insane and those who can avoid it.
For this reason being able to take vacation before (June) or after (August) or really any other time has become a perk and so it's been spread relatively thin. The school vacations though, they're like forced vacations so yes they're roughly 8 weeks to accommodate when their parents have time off, and even that is challenged as they want to travel in the off season. If the vacations had been shorter, all the parents would all have to squish together in those same weeks. Either that or you'd have to make the school vacation flexible, but then you'd have to run it all summer long for those who happen to be there at that time.
As I recall, in summer school was always a place to send your kids to if both parents had to work and you needed someone to take care of you, but that was not school. There were no teachers, no classrooms. It was more like supervised play, basically they kept track that you didn't get lost or hurt but we were left to make up our own activities with those we wanted to play with and there was no forced participation in anything, though they did try to get something going if all looked bored. I suppose in retrospect I'd call it big kid daycare, that's really what it was but there was a completely different level of freedom to it than school.
Nothing beat the sense of freedom from NOT going there though, to really be unsupervised even for just a few hours. I think it's a natural part of growing up, if you're always in school with people looking after you and then always with your parents looking after you then sooner or later you're going to drop off a cliff when you're on your own. I'm mostly glad I didn't have a cell phone as a kid, I couldn't go crying to mommy and daddy and they couldn't be overprotective as independence was sort of a necessity. I think as a parent today it would be awfully hard to let go simply because you have the technological ability not to.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Homeschooling is all day, all week, all year, for life.
We homeschool.
We started when our kids were born.
They learn every day.
Every day of the week.
Every week of the year.
It's lifetime learning.
They still get to be kids.
And they work on our farm.
Their mastery is far above public, and private, school levels for the same age.
They don't spend weeks and months forgetting stuff over vacations and summer.
They don't waste gobs of time on wait-wait-wait and sitting around as is the way of modern schooling.
They take responsibility for learning as they develop that ability rather than being tracked by an artificial curriculum which wastes time on politically correct nonsense.
They learn real science untainted by PC sensitivities.
They love learning. The joy of it isn't killed by the grey public school agenda.
This is like life used to be and better than the disconnected of today which is a result of the dystopia of urban culture.
I was an elected school board member in the 1980s. During that time, I would attend the annual California School Boards Association conferences.
One year, I heard an interesting presentation on a form of year-round schooling. The presenter described a calendar in which regular classes would meet for 9 weeks followed by a 3-week break, making a four-quarter school year. The 3-week break would not be a break for all students. He pointed out that 9 months of failure could not be corrected in only 6 weeks of summer school, a ratio of 6.5 to 1. Instead, students not meeting expected academic performance would have to attend remedial classes during the 3-week break, a ratio of 3 to 1.
It was already a noticeable problem in our schools that students would sometime miss classes because their parents took them on a skiing trip in the winter, to visit family in the spring, or to see fall color. As a member of the 2005-2006 County Grand Jury, I learned that this problem had grown worse county-wide in the 15 years after I left the school board. This radical calendar would provide 3 weeks off for those trips for students who were performing well in class.
This calendar would also provide an extra 2 weeks around Christmas and New Year, when even remedial students and their teachers would be off. It would provide for all the holidays the state Legislature mandates on public schools. Yet it would still involve the full 182 days of instruction annually that the Legislature also mandates. By shifting teacher in-service days to the 3-week breaks, students would actually be learning during all 182 days.
Of course, there would be increased costs for the remedial instruction and for the in-service days. That likely dooms this concept since too many members of the state Legislature think cutting taxes is the most important thing they can do, more important than educating our children, repairing our roads, assuring a supply of water, or anything else.
Research concluded that poor kids, where parents usually don't spend as much 'meaningful' time with the children, because they're busy working three jobs to get food on the table, actually lose knowledge (math, reading comprehension) during summer. Blue collar/middle class children usually were leveled whereas middle class/rich kids actually got a bit smarter during summer. (http://www.education.com/reference/article/Ref_Summer_Learning_Loss/).
So for some children there may certainly be a benefit to less vacation.
One thing that gets missed in this whole year-round school debate is: when is the school going to have time for major maintenance, repairs, and renovations? Many schools are already packed through to the brim (in terms of classroom capacity) so it's not like they can close down an area of the campus/building to get work down while class is in session
Office buildings don't seem to have this problem.
I think the answer is simple: DONT OVERPACK STUDENTS; overbuild capacity is a must. Or construct additional buildings.
Crane lifting a HVAC unit is a once in 30 or 40 years type event.
We homeschool/unschool -- however, at great expense in terms of professional opportunity cost. As others have pointed out to echo your point, there is a big difference between "schooling" and "education". This is true even in the very "best" school districts which can be terribly oppressive places for children whose interests are not mostly academic or, in some cases, artsy and who don't plan to go to a top college and so would bring down the schools college acceptance scores. This can include hands-on practically-oriented children or wide-ranging people-oriented children or free-thinking imaginative children and so on who may not do well in settings focusing on abstraction or interactions with only-same age peers and authority figures or working on assigned tasks with arbitrary structure and with arbitrary timetables.
Your point also connects with bullying, A normal resolution to bullying by another kid might be to avoid him or her and choose different kids to associate with. However, school structure does not permit that for kids crammed together in a classroom. Izzy Kalman and "Bullies to Buddies" provides help for for unavoidable bullies though.
See also by John Taylor Gatto:
"The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://www.worldtrans.org/whol...
"After an adult lifetime spent teaching school I believe the method of mass-schooling is the only real content it has, don't be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and with their families, to learn lessons in self- motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love and lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home life.
Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in. A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; a future which will demand as the price of survival that we follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. [PDF: I question the previous point on material scarcity...] These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it.
I should know."
More by John Taylor Gatto (1992 New York State Teacher of the year) here: https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
Especially: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
"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."
Also: http://www.the-open-boat.com/G...
"Schooling is a for
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I loved school, but I'm for summer break, a generous one from Memorial through Labor Day. In fact I've been mulling whether grown-ups should have summer breaks too, if we could.
School is a narrow, weird world. It readied me in some ways, but in others I was a seedling. There are other ways a child must grow. Playing at home and in the neighborhood, hanging from trees, exploring, etc., are very good for the brain and the heart. Some kids go to camp, whether it be outdoor, sports, music, or whatever. You can't very well spend a month concentrating on a certain field when you have to go to school. I myself wasn't a joiner. I rejected Boy Scouts, band, and all sports. But I made up for it when I discovered moviemaking. In high school I made about 40 movies, short ones, but they had screenplays, multiple camera angles, special effects, editing, the best I could do.
I lament that I no longer have that creativity, and I blame it on the year-round non-stop drudgery that is the American way. Someone once said that a Frenchman told them you need five weeks: one week to get ready, two weeks to go somewhere, and two weeks to recover from vacation. Here we nary get more than week off at a time. There's just never a chance to recharge.
In the USSR summer vacation used to be roughly three months, however children got a list of books to read (and I'm not talking about one, or two. More like 10-15 mandatory and another 10-20 optional) and, come September, were questioned on them.
9th or 10th grade (don't remember) contained such gems as War and Peace (the complete four-tome!), Crime and Punishment, Eugene Onegin, Queen of Spades, and other quite serious works.
I've experienced several school systems and neither Austrian, German or US systems came even close to teaching as much as the Soviet did. I went to "good" schools, some of them quite expensive. In the latter three countries, students were quite vocal about objecting to having more than one exam in a week, even though they had to be announced up front. In the USSR, you just *had* to be prepared for *each* class or risk getting a bad grade for the quarter.
The Soviet system also separated literature and language, as well as math and geometry, whereas the other three systems lumped these subjects together into language+literature and math+geometry.
All in all, the Soviet system was *much* more satisfying and intellectually stimulating than any other system I had the "pleasure" of experiencing.
A short anecdote: we've learned matrices in 7th grade in the USSR. When I was called to the board to solve a system of linear equations in 9th grade in AT, it was quite amusing to experience the surprised teacher say that this is something people learn in University for their STEM degrees.
On the other hand, I had to catch up a year of Latin there, so I guess that even out the surprise. When I later moved to Germany and asked the principal there whether Latin is part of the local curriculum, he asked me if I was planning on listening to Radio Vatican. I thought that's funny at the time, but my little knowledge of Latin still helps me understand a great deal of languages I don't speak and I wish I'd have learned more.
The US school I visited was a jack of all trades, more focused on creative education and quite boring, as I've already went through most of the curriculum in other countries (i.e. it lagged behind all other systems! You people there really gotta work on that, before it's too late.).
BTW, Austria had two months of summer vacation, and Germany around 3-4 weeks (it sucked big time, so unproductive and slow the whole year!).
For my kids, I'd prefer them to go to school in Russia and Austria, as that's a very good mix IMO.
I've heard the Japanese school system is even more intense (with students even committing suicide over the workload, etc.). Maybe someone would like to provide a short comparison in a reply.
This is crazy. We've allowed our kids to be overloaded with homework; now we're letting the education lobby steal summer vacation. Once the state is able to jack the retirement age up to 85 or so we'll have the perfect hive society.
Why is all the good stuff already modded 5, when I have mod points?
...more of it is worse. And even if total days of school are the same, penny-ante 2-week-long breaks spread throughout the year are not as good as a long break to let the body and mind rest from the trauma of public school.
Abolish "schooling" altogether. it's an obstacle to learning.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Summer vacation was originally created so farmers could use their children as labourers during the crop season.
Nowadays it exists mainly because the teachers unions would scream bloody murder if teachers had to work all year like everyone else.
With the number of double-income families nowadays, it would be a lot easier for parents to deal with 4 1-2 week breaks per year instead of a couple months at one shot, due to the hassles of arranging child care for the summer months.
However, I don't expect anything to change in the near future. See earlier point on unions.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Yes, farming was a big reason.
Summer cooling is expensive. Teachers should be paid more if they work more. Nobody would work 2 more months per year at the same pay. (Teachers end and start at different dates than the students.)
I learned a great deal during the summer vacation. Don't let school interfere any further with your child's education!
More children need to be allowed to FAIL... and spend their summer saving face so they can be with their peers again.
Not that anything matters when you have a system geared for rote learning to pass standardized multiple guess exams; ignoring all the less quantifiable education or things not deemed important enough to regiment into a rigid exam system.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
You did learn it, but it wasn't reinforced. Not many people can learn stuff and retain it long periods with only 1 session. You're looking at more like 3 sessions, minimum in order to retain something long term. Many people will require a dozen reinforcements. Think of it like vaccination in a way. Some vaccines you're good with 1 shot. Some require a booster here or there - giving both shots at the same time doesn't work, you NEED separation. Some you need updates on pretty much an annual basis.
The analogy isn't perfect, of course. My point would be that by having such a sharp divide in the form of summer vacation, you lose a bunch of knowledge that hasn't been reinforced enough. It doesn't necessarily take long to provide that refresher, but if you had a shorter break and were rolling into coursework that uses said knowledge/technique if you're still capable of doing it it provides reinforcement without needing a refresher.
Finally, I'll note that I mentioned 'swing of school' for a reason - study habits and learning behaviors are often not reinforced over the summer, so it takes a while to get them to sit down, listen, and work in schooling again.
I don't read AC A human right