should america abolish school summer vacation?

Fuck no. Op is Satan

Give adults a summer vacation, too. Pretty soon it will be too hot in the summer to do a lot of jobs anyway.

[quote] - we could have more times 4 kids 2 learn life skill

Oh, dear.

Perhaps we could take the summer months to teach people how to use the shift key.

Most of my positive childhood memories were during the summer. My mother's mental illness would get really bad during winter and it wasn't less ideal during fall and spring. I'm glad I had time to discover my hobbies and socialize with my extended family and friends. 9 months is plenty of time to learn all the extra stuff, but the problem is that so much time is wasted with interruptions, etc. Treating schools like babysitting institutions is why American education is in the toilet.

Sounds awful.

not every1 has stable home like yours r5, many kids nowadays r from unstable home, so they rely on school as safe refuge and school lunch as food security

Hey, cunt OP.

Learn to use your fourth-grade English skills and communicate like a human being instead of what you perhaps are under the stink of your shallow grasp of everything.

R5 half of the country (at least) lives in hell

Keep those fetuses locked up year round, they annoy me at shopping establishments such as Ikea and Target with their presence. This would keep the crime rate down in the summer too !!

Just kidding. SOMEONE had to be the R1.

No. I think summer school should be mandatory at all ages and grade levels. Work-study, closely observed internships and other vocation/employment assistance required.

The less time kids are around their useless families, the more time they'll have for seeing that they can live their own lives.

I do. School should be year round with:

2 weeks off in the summer. 2 weeks off for holiday/winter break 1 week for spring break 1 week for fall break

And this will help the national teacher shortage how??

State legislatures in red states would refuse to pay teachers for extra work. Fair pay.

OP wrote “ppl would respect teachers more, since they actually work yr round”

That is not true, at least not in America.

um, yes they do

The additional costs to pay teachers and administrators, clean and provide utilities, and pay for bus transportation would be enormous and the vast majority of school districts, and their tax base, couldn’t fund it.

Well, it is more efficient to have schools run year round. Those school busses just sit in a parking lot for 2 months. As it is teachers stay a week after it finishes in the summer and start two weeks before kids get back.

Or could be a rotating schedule so not all kids attend the same Sept-June block. But I guess that’s a nightmare to schedule, esp if you have more than one kid in school.

The children of the great state of FlawDuh are being indoctrinated into democracy through over-education. Six months a year for eight years provides adequate schooling, the remainder of their formative years should be spent at home under the tutelage of their housewife mothers.

[quote] we could have more times 4 kids 2 learn life skill, like tax, plumbing, cooking, nutrition

Whatever this means, it's a big crock of shit. They can learn "life skills" in life. In school they need to learn history, math, science—and whatever linguistic skills OP so woefully lacks.

OP, let other people start threads, please. It isn't for you.

Another class warfare issue.

Upper middle class kids go to camp (day or sleepaway), mom/nanny around to watch them, family goes on extended vacation or has summer house (or all three)

But for the bottom 85%, what to do with their kids during the summer is definitely an issue and they are usually far behind the UMC in school

As a kid, I would have loved having two weeks off quarterly rather than all during the summer. The school year is already broken into quarters with report cards coming out every three months. Just stick a two week break between the quarters. It gets rid of the wasted first month of classes after returning from summer break where all the kids seem to forget everything they learned the prior year until their brains kick back into school mode. It would be better for everyone. I honestly don't see a downside to doing this.

OP apparently was never a child.

Fuck, no.

For a lot of the country it probably makes more sense to shut things down from December to February. It's cold, it's snowy, it's stupid and ridiculous. But I suppose we will keep mindlessly having people drive on ice and snow for the fuck of it.

Hot high school boys should be excused so they can be scantily clad lifeguards. Keep everyone else in the classroom.

r26 = GROOMER!!

In my day, we got a summer job. Saving for college and stupid shit like that.

NO. HOW DARE YOU.

In my school district, the paucity of air-conditioned buildings is a major hindrance just for limited summer school.

Yay! No break from school bullies.

Well, R30, maybe it would force schools to take that huge leap into the, well, 20th century.

No wonder our country is falling so far behind educationally. We use 18th century agrarian schedules to teach 19th century subject matter in 20th century school buildings.

Fuck that air-conditioning bullshit. We never had it in my day, and we got a perfectly good education. That's just an excuse to spend money.

Hell no! Ate you crazy?.

School is fine and all but the whole point has been to ultimate channel you into a meaningless job so you can make some oligarch lots of money.

Harvesting is done in the fall dumbass.

V. import 2 learn tax. Gaaaaaaaaaa!

Speaking of which: When is daylight saving time this year?

I grew up in the 60s and 70s, when schools (and colleges) did not have air conditioning. That's probably why we had a three month break in the heat of the summer.

Teachers would REVOLT. There is no other adult job where you get summer break.

In three weeks r38. Trust me, I've been counting down.

Absolutely not.

Teachers would burn out.

No way. The best times of my childhood were experienced during summer vacation.

Not everybody is a super achiever. Let kids be kids, for Christ sake.

I loved summer vacation. Most of the good memories of my first 18 years seem to be about summer vacation. I never liked school. I did very well in school but I pretty much hated it except for the social life and after school activities. Why do some of you want to trap kids in school all year round?

Also I live in the north and if you take away summer vacation you take away three of the main months kids can enjoy being outdoors. I really don't think we need more helicopter supervision of kids and teens.

OP, harvest is in the autumn, not the summer.

R45, it depends on the crop and the location.

R28 - Yes, they can work for 3 months to get the $32,000 they need for the upcoming year. hahaha

Those of you waxing nostalgic about summer vacation, wouldn't you have liked two weeks off every three months with an extra week like Spring break thrown in there on occasion so you'd have two weeks, at least, off every season. No 9.5 straight months of school only broken by Christmas and Spring break. Less burnout, especially as you get to high school age.

I also think of how much nicer it would be to take family vacations every year and not have to do it when every single other family in the country is doing the exact same thing.

Really, what are the downsides of spreading the breaks out?

I agree: breaking up the summer vacation throughout the year would allow kids to retain knowledge learnt easier from term to term (also sometimes giving your brain a small break on a certain subject allows for you to return to it with more understanding) . Three months on, one off, would mean something like April, August, and December would be free.

My mom and dad were both teachers, so the three of us all stopped going to school in June and began again in September and I don’t think I ever quite got over the feeling that I shouldn’t be working in the office during the 30+ summers of my white collar employment.

Give everybody that time off!

Those of you waxing nostalgic about summer vacation, wouldn't you have liked two weeks off every three months with an extra week like Spring break thrown in there on occasion so you'd have two weeks, at least, off every season. No 9.5 straight months of school only broken by Christmas and Spring break. Less burnout, especially as you get to high school age.

No. LESS burnout? The summer vacation allowed you to completely unwind, psychologically, many families went to the beach or a lake all summer while dad worked and came up on the weekends, and for a couple of weeks. When we had the summer off, we did have a week off for spring break and a week off for February vacation, and another one for Christmas.

Anyway, I'm curious, what is your stake in this?

(First paragraph should have been in quotes)

Too much babysitting as it is. In the old days they worked hard and learned much in a short time because there were tests to pull, milk to churn and straw to bale just to survive.

[quote]The summer vacation allowed you to completely unwind, psychologically, many families went to the beach or a lake all summer while dad worked and came up on the weekends, and for a couple of weeks. When we had the summer off, we did have a week off for spring break and a week off for February vacation, and another one for Christmas.

How to say you are really, really old and grew up better off than 90% of people alive today without saying it.

Do you think this experience was universal back then or anywhere close to reality in today's world?

And, an aside, who the hell had February vacation? Are you American?

R54 Wow, you're an asshole. I'm from Massachusetts. We have always had and still have February school vacation week. New Hampshire also has February vacation. See the link below. Last time I checked Northern New England was still in the US.

As for age, I don't know what that has to do with anything. In the Northeast there are so many vacation areas that fill up with summer people every year. Mass. beach towns on Cape Ann, Cape Cod and the Islands, plus Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine - people have summer cottages, trailers, condos, whatever. It's very common. Same in Eastern Canada and Ontario. They're not usually rich people.

[quote]As for age, I don't know what that has to do with anything.

How to say you're 85 without saying you're 85.

[quote]Mass. beach towns on Cape Ann, Cape Cod and the Islands, plus Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine - people have summer cottages, trailers, condos, whatever. It's very common. Same in Eastern Canada and Ontario. They're not usually rich people.

How to say you and thoe you know are rich AND grew up better off than 90% of the country AND are ignorant of that fact without...well, you know the rest.

Hell no r48.

R56 You're a dumb fuck. I didn't grow up rich at all. My best friend's dad was a letter carrier, they had a cottage - on a pond on the Cape. My great aunt had a two-room cottage on the beach in Maine. My mom and I stayed there most of the summer, my dad came up on weekends and for two weeks. He worked in a paper box factory. I'm 64, so?. If I was 85 I wouldn't be ashamed of it. But you're a pathetic loser. And you were wrong about February vacation, also. Didn'tmention that, I notice.

I was a kid in the 70s r54 and that was common then. Especially the dad leaving the family to go back to work.

My aunt had a cottage and house in the U.P. lots of people would come up there from surrounding areas every year.

Union jobs that no longer exist R60

letter carrier is a union job that still exists r61

In Japan, the school year starts in April and goes to March. There's a couple of weeks off for summer, New Years, and then March is a holiday. There's a weeklong holiday for Golden Week in May as well.

As the calendar was standardized across regions, school leaders took cues from a variety of factors, including attendance rates and the difficulty cooling school buildings. Many upper-class families left the city for cooler climates in the northeast during hot summer months, and as such, schools cancelled their summer sessions due to low daily attendance. As train travel became more affordable, middle-class families followed similar patterns, keeping their children home during the hottest months of the year or going away for a summer vacation.

Additionally, many school leaders advocated for breaks so that students and teachers could rest their brains. Many 19th- and early 20th-century Americans educators believed that too much learning in hot weather was bad for one's health and could result in heat exhaustion and injury, particularly for younger children, whose minds were still developing. The extended summer break was seen as a way for children and their teachers to rest and recover. In many places, teachers would use the summer months for their own learning and professional development, including participating in seminars and courses like those held at Chautauqua.

While the origins of the summer holiday break are often believed to be rooted in agriculture and the idea children were needed to assist with planting and harvesting crops, this is inaccurate. Most crops were planted in the spring and harvested in the fall. (Wikipedia)

oh ok so we have some chatgpt word vomit from wiki, which can b edited by any1

I don't give a damn. I am long out of school, am never going to have any kids, and don't see myself being a teacher any time soon, so it wouldn't impact me whatsoever.

i went too skool and lerned 2 rite like OP

My friend grew up in NC. School started in early August, then there was a break in September or October so the kids could help pick the tobacco crop.

I'm 62 and beach cottages and lake houses were also part of the monied blue collar world in New England the Mid-atlantic states. Don't know about elsewhere. Cape Cod had many middle class vacationers and only a few towns were the "rich folks". Martha's Vineyard had and entire town of middle-class black vacationers. Narragansett and Watch Hill had middle class. Most of of Massachusetts, CT, and NJ were middle class beach towns, ranging from successful blue collar to upper middle class.