Kids have been losing knowledge and part of it is because of summer break. We have summer break because, in the early 1900s, 85% of kids were helping their parents on the farm. Hence, the schools developed a nine-month program so that the kids could help their parents on the farm, according to “eric.ed.gov” and their article titled “The History of School and Summer Vacation,” written by James Petersen from Seton Hall University. Today only about 3% of the children population help out their parents on the farm. This raises a question, Why do we still use the nine-month system? Summer break is bad for kids and needs replacement. Here are the pros, cons, ways to replace, and issues with those replacements.
Firstly we have the pros of summer break. The biggest pros are that the kids and teachers love the long break from school. Usually, it is around 3 months of summer break and kids love having the free time and the time to hang out with friends. The second biggest pro is that summer break gives much time for vacations. According to “Travel Agent Central,” nearly 80% of Americans went on vacation in the year 2023 and it is suspected that there will be more in the year 2024. The list of pros can go on and on but there is one thing arguably more important and that is the cons.
Secondly, we have the cons of summer break. Arguably the biggest con is that summer break sees kids forgetting knowledge. Children learn best when they learn every day as said by “LDonline.org” and their article titled “Summer Learning Loss: The Problems and Some Solutions,” written by Harris Cooper, an American academic social psychologist. The article states that “The long summer vacation breaks the rhythm of instruction, leads to forgetting.” Kids also leave school and come back without as much information. If you speak a different language at home than the language you speak at school it can lead to you forgetting information about that language. All the cons are bad even though some ways exist to fix some of them.
Then we have the solutions. The first solution, and my favorite, is the 6 weeks on and 2 weeks off. Children would go to school for 6 weeks, then they would get 2 weeks off of school. There would still be lots of free time in those two weeks; There could still be enough vacation time. Then we have a second solution in which we just never stop. We could compensate by doing five-hour days, but if we just go to school year-round the kids would get and stay smarter. Another big upside with the 5-hour day system is that the kids could get longer sports practices or even get done with school earlier. Either way summer break needs fixing, but these solutions are perfect.
Lastly, we have the problems with the solutions. The main issue with the first solution is that some people go to their cabin for a month or two every summer. If they start doing school year-round, they wouldn't be able to go for a full month, even though they could go for 2 weeks. The main issue with the second option is that there wouldn't be very much time for vacations even though there is lots and lots of free time, two hours extra each day, although the time for vacations would be limited.
Those are the pros, cons, solutions, and problems with the solutions about summer break. Just like how we needed to switch to the nine-month system in the early 1900s because the kids needed to farm, we need to switch to a more modern system because our current one is not helping. I do believe that if I could go to school year-round, and gain a lot of information, someone wouldn't want to lose this knowledge they just gained. Summer break needs replacement because the cons just now outweigh the pros.