Holmes: Send them all to summer school

If we teach our children that school is a prison, then summer school is extra punishment for the worst offenders. The sting of humiliation and failure adds to the pain of having to go to school when your friends are free.

That’s too bad, because summer school isn’t a punishment, it’s an opportunity. In terms of education, summer vacation isn’t a well-deserved rest; it’s the time students forget much of what they learned.

[…]

Summer vacation persists because of tradition, inertia and the desire of some businesses for seasonal labor. The school calendar may have agrarian roots, but there’s nothing natural about it. The good lord may have decreed that plants sprout in the spring and are harvested in the fall, but he never said kids were supposed to stop learning in the summer. —Holmes: Send them all to summer school (Daily News Trivia)

Sheesh. When I used to teach a two-semester freshman writing course, I was shocked at how much backsliding there was over Christmas.

After I returned the first assignment in January and said something like, “This is not high school anymore, and I won’t expect to have to repeat material that should still be in your notebooks,” the next assignments were much better.

3 thoughts on “Holmes: Send them all to summer school

  1. The article suggests several short breaks instead of one long one, and also advocates installing air conditioning in the schools. The author is writing from a somewhat entitled middle-class American perspective (poor you — you can only afford two weeks of summer camp). It might in fact actually be a burden on the local taxpayers to install air conditioning. Kids don’t have to waste their time over the summer, as Will noted.

  2. And yet, there’s something to be said for giving the mind a break and allowing it to rejuvenate. No?

    I didn’t really grow up in a place where teenagers were allowed to earn their own spending money, but for any kid who managed to live through the grilling of an Indian school board syllabus, eight weeks of summer were a god sent. Try making a kid work on arithmetic in the sweltering heat. Better yet, try teaching it.

  3. Sheesh!

    Just read this paragraph:
    “Having watched my children blow most of their summers playing video games, talking on the phone and intensively tanning, I question the value of a full 10 weeks off during the summer even for middle-class kids. A week or two of camp is all we can afford, and we can’t fill the rest of the summer months with day trips and family vacations.”

    Frankly, it sounds like someone’s managed to find a perfect union between their love of school and their desire to have their school babysit their kids for them.

    Even assuming that I’m totally off base there, I balk at the assumption that school is obviously and naturally teaching kids everything they need to know. Perhaps kids would, I don’t know, actually like to pursue interests that neatly fit into a class with 30 desks and a prewritten textbook? Perhaps there might be more to learn and experience in life than what they teach at school.

    P.S. I almost forgot – do you remember how you had any money during high school? It’s called “the summer job”.

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