Maggie's Farm

When our kids were little, summers were great because we could leave our horrible suburb and retreat to the country for three months. My spouse would work, but I would keep the kids busy with assorted projects, garden, cook, read, write, and generally enjoy life in a place at least 20 degrees cooler, with cleaner air, with no neighbours in sight. But this isn't possible past mid-elementary school, as kids begin to have important friendships, and the old summer house model changes from a for three months one to a long weekend mode.

I still believe that if a family has the luxury of having the mom at home (IMHO, the best thing for the kids), it's important to have the summer off so the family can spend some time on fun family expeditions together and into home schooling the kids in the things that public schools leave out, and just spend time with the kids. They grow up so fast.

Summers off are great for kids who are in talented and gifted programs and under a lot of pressure in the school year, because they can just read and read for pleasure for a change. Also, kids can help (even now) with the garden, with family chores outdoors (one paints, fixes things, builds things when the weather is good). Kids can earn money (ours stopped getting allowance in early teens and had to work for anything they wanted after that. We didn't allow cars as they would have had to work too many hours, and that would have interfered with academics.

Summers are also good, as they get older and get fed up with us old and busted parents for intensive language courses, or courses away. Things like choir camp, writers' workshops, science camps, Outward Bound, traditional summer camp, basically get the kid away from parents and make them do something difficult that makes them more independent. Certainly, if they don't go to boarding school, they should do some of these away activities in the summer so they aren't smothered by well meaning hover parents. Obviously travel. Or going and staying a long time with a relative. When I was 17 I spent a summer looking after a grandparent who had been ill.

With our kids, we spent a large part of the summer filling in the gaps in their education (they went to a good public school, but all kinds of subjects were ignored or taught in a PC way). So we would spend the summer going on field trips, and doing projects, a kind of modified home school part of each day.

In college one of my kids worked three jobs through the school year and was fortunate enough that her school had great summer jobs kids could apply for related to their field, that she did, with stipends and living expenses. But during the weeks at the end, while her peers played and took family vacations, she tutored dumb rich kids in our home town to get better SAT scores, so as to save up more money for school So summer was never relaxing. As a result of all this work, said kid had no trouble finding a good job after graduation...

Short form: year round school is good if you view school as day care for working parents. But if you think of education, it's good for kids to have variation. After nine months of classes and RUSH RUSH RUSH to get to school, and sports and music lessons and choir and every other commitment, and 5 hours a night of homework, kids need a break. Perhaps not to loaf, but to learn different things, at a different pace. Then, again, being bored leads to a lot of creativity (as well as mischief). Kids need to daydream, to explore, to build forts in the woods, play war games, go rowing and sailing and camping like the kids in Swallows and Amazons, kids need to spend hours sketching things and writing stories and lying in the grass scratching the dog's ears and wondering about the world. People invent things and solve problems and imagine wonderful things when they have space to dream them up. Summers are good for that...

But we have to recognise that most parents nowadays DO view school as day care. So probably there will be more moves for all year school. Good for the harried working parents, hard on the kids....