Summer Schooling

September 08, 2012

Here we are in the middle of a very hot summer, wishing for nothing more than for our air conditioning to wait until next month if it’s going to break. The world is in full bloom, and children are out and about, laughing in the long days of the year. Have you ever wondered about that, about why children have the summer off from school?

The answer is actually a lot more complex than you would first think. Back when the schooling system was young, there were two different calendars that the students would follow. There was a schedule for rural, farming families. Students following this schedule had long breaks in the spring and in the fall, which allowed them to help with the planting and harvesting in the fields. The other option for urban students was to go to school for much longer periods of time with a little break every quarter.

There was a lot of concern about the effects of the school scheduling and finding the balance between too little schooling for the rural students and too much schooling for the urban students. So, when consistency became the goal, the two schedules were combined. As it happened to line up with the agrarian calendar, this just made sense, and it has been that way ever since.

Heather G.
Oak Grove Branch