It’s difficult to argue that summer vacation isn’t a great time. After a grueling school year and its dizzyingly cathartic end, a long break seems almost vital for us all to keep forging on.
However, summer vacation is an exercise in excess.
German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus presented the forgetting curve hypothesis in 1885, which suggests that memory retention decreases over time when one doesn’t make an attempt to retain it. Jaap M. J. Murre and Joeri Dros of the University of Amsterdam successfully replicated his classic experiment in 2015 and found that the subject spent more time relearning information after just 31 days–which is only a small chunk of our allotted break time.
The negative effect of year-round schooling in terms of teachers and their summer jobs is a valid point, and I concede that shifting to a single or multi-track school schedule would be detrimental for that reason.
However, these two types of year-round schooling are still viable. Single track schooling allows for the same number of school days a year, split between 45 days in session and 15 days of vacation. On the other hand, multi track schooling splits school time between grade levels to maximize building capacity. The frequent breaks in both lessen the chance of students forgetting material while also alleviating burnout in both teachers and students. Fairfax County Public Schools has paired with the Safe Community Coalition to provide sessions for highly stressed students, and yet the 2015 FCPS Youth Survey states that one in three students reported depressive symptoms within that year.
While a summer vacation provides students with an extended period of time to recuperate from the stress of the school year, more frequent breaks would keep students from building up that kind of tension.