School Holidays Are a Pointless Relic of the Past
2nd February 2012
The 9am to 3.30pm day, with six-week summer holidays, is not only no longer relevant to our lives, but also puts significant and unnecessary strain on teachers, parents and children.
The roots of the scheduling rest in our agricultural heritage, when families required their children’s labour in the summer to pick fruit and farm the land. As far as I’m aware, not one of our intake has toiled in the fields in the past century. Rather, they spend their summer forgetting what they have learnt during term, getting into mischief and worse. The reasoning behind a 3.30pm finish was largely the same: children were needed to help at home, with cleaning, cooking and laundry. Nowadays the chores consist of little more than turning on the dishwasher.