It's time to send the kids to school all year
My push to end summer vacation is based in reality, I swear
What if we got rid of summer vacation and made school all year round? After all, summer vacation is a leftover vestige of the 19th century when families needed their kids home to work on the farm. Experts say summer vacation ruins education and it has an extremely negative impact on the economy.
My kids are home right now and my ability to work or write is basically reduced to nil. My wife works from home as well and has a rather important job. Yet the kids being home is a constant disruption.
What about putting them into summer camp, you ask?
Those are completely unaffordable. Thousands of dollars a month per child plus they’re all fully booked before the winter is even out. We’re in the unfortunate position of being in a middle-class income whereby we don’t make enough to live but make too much to qualify for any meager government programs.
It’s not only me complaining about it. Look at what the experts say.
Summer vacation - a primer
Many countries around the world do not have summer vacations for the kids. China, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea have year-round schooling, and they’re called Asian Tigers for a reason.
Several European countries eschew summer vacation and instead opt for a few weeks of break time.
But things are different here in North America, where it takes a long time for people to accept new ideas. Summer vacation was first introduced in America in the mid-19th Century when the vast majority of the population were farmers. Kids were a source of labor, and they needed them home during the prime growing months of the summer to help on the farm. This concept spread to Canada and several Central and south American countries before the century was out.
Economic impact of a useless holiday
But farming is only a small percentage of the economy today. Most people live in cities and work on a job site. Many work from home since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Studies have found that the economic impact of summer holidays largely depends on the economic driver of the local community. Larger cities with diverse economies actually lose money and productivity during the summer months thanks to summer vacation. Parents work less, there is less foot traffic to restaurants and bars, and people have less money to spend thanks to exorbitant summer camp fees.
But areas heavily dependent on tourism tend to do better in the summer months, but not because of vacationers. According to The Edvocate, which studies education in the United States, employers of tourist sites depend on an army of low-paid high school students to work over the summer months. Many of these businesses can’t, or won’t, pay for more skilled workers, so the economic impact of year-round schooling hits them the hardest.
So we sacrifice the overall economy on behalf of some exploitative grifters trying to abuse teenagers to make a buck.
Summer slide
Education experts have found a major loss of learning among children each year due to summer vacations. Officially it’s called “Summer Learning Loss” but educators call it the “Summer Slide.”
Teachers in the primary grades need to spend the first two months of every new school year re-teaching lessons they had wrapped up the previous year. STEM knowledge is most severely impacted, with mathematics, chemistry, biology and technology science skills taking a big hit every single year.
There are other correlative effects with proven causation of summer slide. High school dropout rates are 36 per cent higher in societies with summer vacation than those without. This statistic is the same regardless of language or culture. For instance, both China and Poland have higher graduation rates and more literate and tech-focused students than both Canada and Columbia, which have summer vacations.
The push to end summer vacation
There are several organizations pushing to end summer vacation in Canada and the United States. The Council of Ontario Directors of Education (CODE) published a report in 2010 which highlighted the findings of a 30-year study in Ontario schools. The negative educational and economic impact of summer vacation was undeniable, and the council recommended reducing summer vacation to a few weeks, instead of two and a half months.
Similar organizations have come to the same conclusions across North America. But good old-fashioned North American conservatism and NIMBYism is holding everything back.
The NIMBY brains
I cannot stand the NIMBY mentality. This outlook on the world is the reason we cannot have nice things here in Canada or America, while places like China are excelling at an extraordinary pace.
NIMBY stands for Not In My Back Yard. It usually applies to buildings at the municipal level, but the mentality can be applied to anything. It’s when someone is vehemently against anything new. There may be selfish justifications for opposing any new thing, such as losing home value or changing a view, but most of the time it is a knee-jerk reaction to anything different.
Bike lanes? No! I’ve always owned the road in my big SUV, and I always will! Densification? Nooo! Single-family detached homes in the suburbs worked so well in the 1960s, so we MUST continue with this!
End summer vacation? REEEEEE!
This is how most people in intellectually-challenged societies like North America react to the concept. People refuse to look at the studies and revert to their more base NIMBY brain. This pushback to the idea of ending summer vacation comes up in the media and in school board meetings every single time there’s a discussion.
I love my kids, but…
Don’t get me wrong. I love my kids, more than I’ve ever loved anything in my life. Only a parent understands this kind of love. I love them especially when they’re away at school or tucked in bed and sleeping.
Because when they’re home all day, every day, I get really annoyed by them. They won’t let me have more than a few moments of peace, and as a writer, this is disastrous to my career. Other authors have done it, as I wrote about last week, but holy crap I just don’t have it in me!
So for purely selfish reasons (even possibly my NIMBY brain), can we end summer vacation once and for all?