Who didn’t relish belting out “School’s out for summer, school’s out forever” at some point in their academic career?  Fun as it was, is our educational schedule breeding laziness and academic inferiority? A column in the latest Economist offers some interesting statistics:

-American children have one of the shortest school years anywhere, 180 days compared with 200 for East Asian countries.

-German children spend 20 more days in school than American ones, and South Koreans over a month more. Over 12 years, a 15-day deficit means American children lose out on 180 days of school, equivalent to an entire year.

-American children also have one of the shortest school days, six-and-a-half hours, adding up to 32 hours a week. By contrast, the school week is 37 hours in Luxembourg, 44 in Belgium, 53 in Denmark and 60 in Sweden.

The article stated that “the long summer vacation acts like a mental eraser, with the average child reportedly forgetting about a month’s-worth of instruction in many subjects and almost three times that in mathematics. ”

It argues that over the long haul this will make Americans less competitive for jobs in the international marketplace.

I would argue that while many of those children aren’t in school, they are still participating in activities that are mentally stimulating. Unfortunately, in our system, the onus is on the parents to provide those opportunities, often at significant additional expense. This is especially disadvantageous for poor families, whose children may end up in front of the television for lack of an affordable option. And it can be exasperating for parents to cobble together child care and educational activities for all the hours their children are out of school but the parents have to work (Durango mom Audrey Crane adroitly chronicles the dilemma in this blog post on the subject). The article asserts that this is a holdover from our agrarian past when children were needed on the farm. Maybe it is time the school year caught up with today’s reality.

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Tags: activities, Education

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