Most countries ought to go Dutch or Danish: shorten their school holidays to six weeks in summer and roughly that again over the rest of the year
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskEuropeans suffer from—or enjoy—a reputation for leisure and plentiful holidays. This is well deserved for adults, many of whom will soon be turning on their out-of-office messages for weeks on end. Children are not always so lucky, relatively speaking. An axis of countries running through Europe, including Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and bits of Switzerland, have some of the rich world’s shortest school breaks.
Of all the reasons to prefer shorter holidays, their impact on learning is the most obvious. Staying away from school for too long results in what experts call “the summer slide”. Budding brains have a knack for forgetting what they have just been taught. Reading, writing, and particularly arithmetic suffer as weeks away from school turn into months. Shorter breaks translate into longer terms, too.
Beyond penalising students and parents, long holidays accentuate inequality. The effect of summertime learning loss is worst for poorer pupils, and helps explain part of their shortfall in grades against their better-off peers. That is in part because well-heeled parents can afford weeks of space camp, coding classes and other enriching activities during holidays—a veritable industry now exists in America to polish youngsters’s in readiness for college applications.
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