Good or bad?
My feeling on this is that this time is wasted. Most schools have airconditioning and therefore have no restrictions about summer operation and have heat so there are no restrictions about winter operation. The mass majority of people do not work on farms so there isn't the dire need for their seasonal labor. So kids could go to school year round without putting a lot of economic hardship on their families.
But as with most questions about education, you miss the core question. That is: Is education in the format of Public School Education a good thing. To that I I answer a full NO. There is no reason to put hundreds to thousands of kids of all similar ages into a building and hope some of them learn something. It is here that a truely free market in education would be vastly different and kids and parents would be able to select the programs that are best for their kids.
Economics does not descriminate on the goodness or badness of a government policy. It can only give information on the results of the policy and attempt to predict unintended consequences.
The only way to truely judge the goodness of badness of this is to have a true free market in education. Then the market will make time during the summers if appropriate and remove time if not.
^ couldn't agree more.
(english is not my native language, sorry for grammar.)
Maybe private schools could afford air conditioning so they have school year round?
Note that I was careful to use the term "format of Public Education". Private and these new charter schools as far as I can tell just copy the Public Schools. That makes them slightly worse for copying a bad idea.
I think that because such a large percentage of young people go to public schools and that this has such a big effect on the national culture, that this seriously limits the options of private schools to really just be public school, but slightly better, and with kids from richer families.
I don't really get the 'indoctrination' theory that libertarians tend to talk about in public schools. Yes its true that they are teaching a very pro state curriculum, but there is no puppet master pulling the strings, and many private schools are going to be just as bad. Its not like there are many private schools at saying how bad FDR and Lincoln were as presidents.
I think the arguments for having public schools are ridiculous. People will claim, what about the poor kids, you can't punish them, its not their fault. Well then why isn't public school like welfare and only for poor people?
Well, it was not an economics question, but a general question, hence in general category.
I feel that on one hand, schools have too many sorts of unnecessary holidays as it is, and with this kind of loose work culture, they never cover their OWN syllabi!
On the other hand, summertime has been the one occasion for a kid to learn something different, possibly for him to tinker with a few electronic items and become an inventor.
But isn't the format of the public school system borrowed from a schooling system that existed before government involvement in education? Masses of people in classrooms with a single instructor was a system once used for religious education - since everybody couldn't just sit down and read thick books, they got somebody else to do it, and have him give them the gist later. It is interesting that when this was the system, grown adults got a young person to read books in the library, and tell them what it was about. So the ones being instructed were more aggressive than the ones instructing, demanding, "NO! Tell it right! Tell it right!"
Well statists want state schooling for all to provide equal opportunities (misery) for all. The real outrage is assuming all kids are the same.
For example, there's a Dutch girl Laura Dekker who basically lived on sailboats all her life and wanted to be the youngest ever (at 13 years old) to sail around the world last september. The child protection agency stopped her from doing so, a case they won anyway as the court decision was late in the fall, too late to do certain parts of the world trip.
It was really outrageous to read all the house-wife-1,2children-and-a-dog crowd comments on how the parents should be put in jail or fined extremely hard (The Dekker family has money and used every legal trick in the book). She can now finally leave, thank goodness:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-10772051
What people nowadays don't realize is that for most of human history, people were mid life at age 18. Studying to 24, which seems about the norm nowadays regardless of intellectual talents, is an absurd decadency and only useful for scholars basically. Also, with current communication technology and the standardized world trip sailing routes, having your kid sail around the world in 2010 is less dangerous than letting him ride his horse 100 miles away in 1510.
I know I can tell a "horror" story from my own experience as when i was in 8th grade, the principal, with school board support, felt her students weren't "reading enough", so she mandated 1/2 of reading time in the morning before classes started, shortening instruction time. The other part of this was the teacher would read aloud, with the students following along.. how would time help?
/rambling
I know summer vaction here is looked forward too, and the only excuse some people have is that its too hot to have kids walking to/fro bus stops... but they play outside in summer so thats moot...
Also I'm sure that will allow them a full school year, assuming they keep the state testing, to actually cover material- school is mid-august to early june, and testing is in march, and that march test decides, in addition to grades in class, whether you advance, although it is the entire years material, several months before you "cover" it
I feel like all schools, including colleges and universities, should be organized in such a fashion: you should be able to pick and choose which classes you take (just like in college), and the school year ought to be divided into four month long trimesters. That way, if any student wants to, they can take a four month long break, or they can go to school year-round. Same with professors and teachers: if they want to take a break from teaching to focus on research or personal life, they can just absolve themselves of teaching for a trimester and come back during a later trimester. Furthermore, I feel like four months is the perfect period to learn the subject matter taught in a class. And if schools were open year-round, then students could finish college much more quickly.
Political Atheists Blog
Everytime I read a discussion about public schools I get frustrated. I always feel like years of my life were stolen from me. Oh, wait, they were...
I agree with krazy kaju on this, but it would be at what point would the kids be able to decide which classes at what semester. I don't see it working in elementary unless the parents decide.
That would be between the parents and the children, with children having the option to run away in so far market altruism provides shelter homes and education for those kids seeking it. Independent living by selling goods and services is also an option if the kid prefers full control over his life, leisure, education.
So for children, the guarantee for education and freedom of choice therein would be max(parents,charity,own market value). This charity can be seen as an indirect, financial form of social ostracism towards the parents, an expression of subjective values regarding the need for education (including the type and topics) in society which results in a max limit of authority by parents over their kids.
I know I feel half-way decent about my 12 years mainly because my parents and I were not afraid (mainly my Italian mother) to push the issues, and go over not only teacher but "guidance" counselor and principals to sympethetic school board members and force the math and science based ciriculum, as I knew, as early as 4th grade, I was going to be an engineer, and was lucky enough to be in a school district that offered most, not all of the classes to reduce the time i'll need in college.
Questions about the efficiency of public education as a whole aside, as I think we're all in agreement on that issue here...
I rather like the concept of summer vacation. It gave me a signifigant amount of time away from school to persue other stuff outside of a planned schedule. Primarily I'd go off with my friends and interact with them outside of a structured environment. I also spent a good deal of time helping my parents with the small home-based beekeeping buisness they ran on the side of thier normal jobs.
When I was older, in highschool and later college, I was able to hold steady summer jobs that gave me work experience and income. In college that time allowed me to conduct field research.
If all you're doing is looking at a child's life from the perspective of an educator, then maybe that summer break is "wasted time". However, it's only wasted if the child and the parents decide to make that time wasted. I probably learned as much about history, physics, biology, and art outside of the classroom as I did inside, if not more.