Summer Vacation, ahhhhh

Posted in Teaching on May 27, 2010 - 12:17 PM

When I am discussing with others my thoughts about how our conventional education system should change, I am sometimes asked, in exasperation, if there Is anything about our existing approach to education that I do agree with. This past week, I have re-encountered one thing that I really do love about schools and their traditions -- and that is the rhythms of the academic year. Work, work, work, break; work, work, work (thinking about break), break. Right now I am in a break between the spring semester and the summer and am fully enjoying it. I just love summer time (not because of the heat, mind you!) and even though I am working and teaching throughout the summer, there's just something about the end of the school year that is so appealing to me.

Prior to my teaching career (but after having been a student for 20 years), I worked in the world of business. While I did have some vacation time, it wasn't like all employees took the same time off. The business was almost always open and the work continued unabated. I found this overwhelming and, in some ways, anti-climactic. It seemed I never had any major end to look forward to, as I had while a student. For some reason, I just like that sense of closure that comes at the end of the school year or semester. It somehow seems right, complete; but maybe that is because that is all I knew before entering the world of business.

Most people are fairly familiar with how our conventional school calendar is connected with our contry's agrarian past and have probably heard arguments about how out-dated and irrelevant that schedule is to our current society's needs and that we should move to a year-round schedule instead. While I see the logic of such arguments, I am attached enough to the traditions to be hesitant to go in full favor of such a change. But how can I reconcile my desires to overthrow much of our conventional education system with my desire to retain this particular tradition? Doesn't this make me a hypocrite of sorts? Or are the two ideas -progressive education and traditional school calendars - possibly compatible?

Progressive educational thinkers, I believe, are in favor of natural rhythms - of there typically being a beginning, middle, and end to things. Thus the traditional school year, viewed in this way, makes sense in that it has clear and discrete phases - a start, a middle, and a culmination.

But thought of in other ways, perhaps the traditional school year is incompatible with progressive educational ideas. For example, shouldn't we enjoy living in the moment and enjoying what we are doing at a given time? In schools, I think, too many students and teachers (myself sometimes included) view the end of the school year as THE paramount destination and forget to stop and savor what is going on in the present. Svi Shapiro (2006) wrote in Losing Heart that "to experience what we are doing as nothing more than a vehicle to get us to something else alienates us from the present, and teaches us to view education as not much more than a passport to some future state or opportunity" (p. 21). Because the rhythms of the school year encourage that sense of always looking to the future, perhaps retaining the tradition is a bad thing to do.

And in conventional schools, the too-sharp distinctions between the school year and summer (or winter) vacations may lead people - children in particular - to the conclusion that learning/working and playing (vacation leisure, assuming it is available) are mutually exclusive. I think progressive educators would be very much opposed to this idea in that they emphasize the joyful nature of learning and how learning and playing can become virtually indistinguishable from one another. For this reason, then, perhaps retaining the traditonal school calendar is not such a great idea.

So, keep a traditional calendar? Even though I can definitely see both sides of this debate, my vote is yes, keep the traditional calendar, for now. Perhaps if we begin to see more of an embracing of progressive visions for education, we will see that we can follow natural rhythms (start-middle-end) while also enjoying the present moment, and understanding that learning/working and playing don't have to exist in dichotomous states. Could we create schools that feel, at least in part, like summer vacations? Perhaps this is a new tradition that we could start together!

Tags for this entry:
play, work, school calendar, vacation

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