Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
As much as he enjoys his work at school, Poor Elijah also enjoys being home. That’s why I was surprised to find him with a scowl fixed on his summer face.
“I’m practicing looking miserable,” he explained. “That way they’ll all think I’m having a horrible time.”
I recognized his distress. He was suffering from TGSO syndrome – Teachers Get Summers Off. That’s the chronic affliction that torments teachers from the first of May till the last week in August, when every passerby who knows how you make your living asks what you’ll be doing with your eight-month summer vacation.
Not that mind-numbing graduate courses, curriculum committees, steamy beach books like “Methods of Educational and Social Science Research: An Integrated Approach,” and house painting constitute an idyllic American vacation. But what we do with our summers, and whether we enjoy them, which my friend and I do, has nothing to do with deciding if school summer vacation is a good thing. Teachers’ needs, whims and wishes are irrelevant.
Experts preach that summer recess is a pointless relic of our agrarian past when children were needed on the farm. They’re wrong. Most farmers I know don’t regard the last week in August as the end of their busy season. They also go to work long before the third week in June. Apparently they’ve got these little side activities called planting and harvesting that occur outside the typical school vacation season.
Modern summer recess was actually born when 19th century Americans moved to cities, and the rising urban middle class demanded time to take a summer vacation like the Vanderbilts did.
The fact that more American children once helped in the fields in no way means that cheap child labor was the chief value of summer recess, any more than a note on the society page that you’d spent a classy week in Newport or Coney Island was its primary benefit for children and their families.
Remember – schools don’t give us our children back. We send our children to school. That’s a vital distinction to bear in mind as we debate where our children should be spending more of their time.
Critics of summer recess typically argue that students forget too much over summer break and that too much time is spent each fall reviewing the preceding term’s material. They suggest that several month-long interruptions throughout the year would work better.
An annual introductory review provides a useful running start for many children. For most of us, hearing something once is not enough. While some students do lose academic ground during the summer, Christmas break offers ample evidence that these same children forget things every time they take a week or so off. Extended breaks scattered throughout the year would hardly guarantee more continuity for the typical student. In fact, additional month-long interruptions would require both repeated reviews of material and refresher courses in the school routines, rules, and expectations we have to restate and they have to readjust to each fall.
Beyond rearranging vacation intervals, some experts recommend extending the school year itself. Many, like Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, contend that American children spend less time in school than their international cousins. International comparisons, however, like a recent Center for Public Education study, consistently find that “the U.S. does not require schools to provide less instructional time than other countries,” including “high-performing countries” like Korea, Finland, and Japan. Among the 50 states, “high-performing” Vermont requires fewer elementary hours “than any other state,” a requirement that still exceeds Finland’s and Korea’s. “All but five states require more” than the international OECD average.
It isn’t fair or helpful to compare school calendars without also noting that other countries frequently segregate their students from an early age in separate vocational and academic systems, often regardless of student or parental preferences, expect and enforce stricter classroom discipline, and rely on families to supplement and support their children’s education in ways that many American families don’t.
This isn’t to say that assigning students early on to entirely separate school systems according to their abilities, and regardless of their preferences, is the best way to run things. It also isn’t true that American families never encourage and assist their children to succeed academically. Many do. But if you’re looking to other nations for the key to improving our schools, the way we group our students, design and target their instruction, govern our classrooms, and support the whole process from home are all far more telling factors in determining achievement.
If we’re aiming to increase the time American students spend on academic work, all we have to do is decrease the time they spend in school on everything else. I’m not talking about phys ed and music. I’m talking about the host of social services chores that we’ve been leaving at the schoolhouse door for the two generations. I’m talking about the rampant epidemic of classroom disruption, about the delays and distractions that result when we unwisely group students of vastly different abilities together in the same class in the name of dubious social and self-esteem objectives. I’m talking about the absurd, innovative notion that you have to give students class time to do their homework at school because some of them won’t do it at home.
Everybody’s talking about the demise of the family. Meanwhile, we’re doing all we can to make sure nobody’s home anymore. That’s why I believe in summer vacation.
I don’t have an easy answer for families where both parents work. Maybe it’s as simple as publicly funding private babysitters, especially if that’s all our schools are becoming. Maybe caring for their children is a burden that parents need to anticipate and bear. Maybe the notion that there’s an unalienable constitutional right for every man, woman, and child to carry an iPhone needs a second look.
I’ll tell you this. Consigning children for ever longer days and years to a social institution where randomly selected, unrelated hordes of children spend chaotic days being supervised by grossly outnumbered adults who aren’t their parents is no way raise healthy, well-adjusted human beings.
School is a place we should send our children so they can learn the school stuff we can’t readily teach them ourselves. But school is no place to grow up.
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