Summer Vacation, Time for a change

Three months off in the summer? Who thought this up? I started thinking about it, and my first thought was that it must have to do with farming, since it seems like a once useful, yet now outdated idea (as is daylight savings time). However, that wouldn't make much sense, because I thought harvests were in the fall and spring. I looked into it, and apparently school used to be held in two 3 month sessions during summer and winter. That obviously would not work nowadays, but that makes more sense than summer vacation for those times.

Then from that same article, I read that students would only attend school for 6 months or so anyway, so they cut down the calendar accordingly. What? I would like to know how that worked - I'm picturing a revolution rising within a school with one brave fifth grader leading marches out of the school until the administration gave up. It's every schoolchild's dream. Wikipedia was mostly useless on the subject - they only suggested that it was so schools would have time to clean and such. 3 months of cleaning, I don't buy it. Now I'm quoting from that article in Slate: "1) Poorly ventilated school buildings were nearly unbearable during heat waves. 2) Community leaders fretted that hot, crowded environments facilitated the spread of disease. 3) Wealthy urbanites traditionally vacationed during the hottest months, and middle-class school administrators were following in their footsteps."



That's a reasonable explanation. However, those times are over, health is always an issue, but it's far far from the level at which it used to be, and A/C is pretty much standard everywhere. I've heard of the suggestion for year round school which does 9 weeks on, 3 weeks off. Some places even do that. Then I came across the idea of rotating that 3 month break through the seasons. That way, across the span of 4 years, you would have had a vacation in each of the seasons. That seems reasonable, but very hard to implement.

To be honest, I really just thought all of this up because of my desire to take winters off and snowboard the entire time. Man, that would be good times.

Photo: Flickr

Godspeed.



This posted tagged as: ranting