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RnBPhilly: The smell of barbecue in the air means only one thing, summer is in full affect and your kids are likely enjoying time spent with friends and less about school. Who didn’t enjoy time off from school, being able to roam the streets knowing that tomorrow Mrs. Wallace wasn’t going to be asking you for your writing assignment. But is summer vacation actually bad for your kids?

Summer break has been an American tradition since the 19th century, when society was mostly agrarian. School was not held in the summer months because children were needed to help the in the fields and farms. Many children missed additional schooling because of farmwork in the spring and fall. But children didn’t actually get a break in the modern sense of the word. The modern sense of the phrase, “summer vacation‚” is associated with laziness, or carelessness. “

Just give me a cold glass and a lounge chair and my summer is complete!”

But children of the 19th Century didn’t break, they worked during the summer months, keeping their brains sharp even though not in a school setting.

Summer vacation has changed over the years and now majority of american children do nothing during summer. Students in the U.S. are lagging behind their Chinese, Korean, and German counterparts partly due to how we use our summer vacations.

President Obama has been pushing for big changes in education. One of which is to add to the already3,000 year round schools in the United States. Most believe these schools keep students in the classroom for more days out of the year; this is not true. Most year-round schools have exactly the same number of school and vacation days as traditional schools.

With the world changing at a rapid pace, we need to look at how and what we teach our kids under a sharper microscope. Tweeking the structure of the learning setting in this country would start the change we need to fix this horrid education system. In such competitive world, our children should be learning during the summer months if America will one day be great again.

words by: @Blogzworth

[RnBPhilly]

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