Summer Vacation should be abolished

Summer vacation is a product of the early days of the American education system. During this period, many students lived on farms and were required to help at home with the annual harvest. Summer vacation was created to allow ample time for students to help on the farms without missing out on instruction. The vacation thus became cemented into the American education system, and it is a legacy which we have to this day. It is one of the most prized aspects of education, and it provides a tangible goal for students ("I just have to make it through three more weeks of school, and then summer!"). However, since we no longer live in an agricultural society, the annual practice of giving a vacation only continues because of tradition.

Tradition is not a good enough reason to keep doing something, especially when the harmful effects of summer vacation have been shown.

The negative effects of summer vacation's learning loss can be abated by parents placing children in various enrichment programs such as academic camps or private lessons, but studies show that lower-class families are less likely to take these steps, usually for financial reasons. Thus, while summer vacation hurts all students, it in particular hurts lower-class students more and students who are English language learners.

Aside from the scholarly arguments, I have some cases of my own for why summer vacation should be abolished.

First of all, having a summer vacation through college creates unrealistic expectations for adulthood. There is no such thing as "summer vacation" in the adult world, and it is ridiculous for us to raise children to practice having an extended break. Besides, when you are a student, that is your job--to study. It should be treated as such, without 3-month breaks. Instead, we could create "vacation days" for students just as there are vacation days for working adults. I will touch on this more near the end.

Second, abolishing summer could speed the educational process along. In elementary school in particular, there is a ton of overlap between different grade levels of math. Also, a lot of time is spent at the beginning of each school year reviewing the content from the previous year. If summer vacation were eliminated, a lot of instruction time could be saved. This could either allow students to learn more material in 13 years of school (perhaps it could become standard to introduce Calculus in the K-12 system), or it could reduce the 13-year process to maybe 8 or 9 years. Students could then spend some time deciding on a field of interest before deciding what to study in college.

Third, eliminating summer would eliminate the pressure that many students feel to find a summer job. The whole concept of a "summer job" is becoming increasingly rare, particularly since the Great Recession (I have had personal experience with that). My inability to find a summer job after I graduated high school was a leading cause in my depression spells that summer--I felt useless, worthless, and guilted by my parents.

On a similar note (this is maybe point 3.5), teaching could become a more financially intelligent career option. Even though teachers are currently woefully underpaid given the critical social work that they do, an argument goes that they are paid so little because they only work 9 months out of the year. True, but do you really think they are going to be able to find another source of income in the other 3 months? Teachers do a lot of preparatory work in the off-months anyway. Abolishing summer vacation would justify paying teachers a year-round salary. But won't increased public costs in wages be an issue? one might argue. I suspect that costs would probably stay about the same, if students finished the 13-year track in 8 or 9 years.

In my ideal world, what would a school year look like? The year should be divided into four quarters (January-March, April-June, July-September, October-December), with one school year extending from January to December. (This way, we could say "the 2014 school year" rather than "the 2013-2014 school year.") There would be a week-long break after quarters 1 and 3, and there would be a 3-week long break after quarters 2 and 4. Three weeks is long enough for families to take vacations. As mentioned above, students could also have maybe 15-20 "vacation days" per year that they could use throughout the school year, in the same manner as for full-time adult employees. That could help offset the congested airports and roadways that would surely result from the 3-week semester breaks. Students would then finish the K-12 education in 8 or 9 years, and then spend a couple years working or figuring out what interests them so that they can be better prepared to select a college major.

Of course, this will never happen. Summer vacation is too treasured of a thing for the system to change, as evidenced by the movie Recess: School's Out!. It is nice to dream of a more sensible, equitable, and efficient education system, though.