© 2017 Michael
Swickard, Ph.D. If we know
allowing academic skills to go unused causes those skills to atrophy, why have three-month
summer vacations in public schools? And, why is there the notion that after high
school graduation people don’t need to use their academic skills to retain
them?
The reason
some high school graduates cannot read, write coherently or do math to an
adequate level is not because they haven’t been taught these skills. Rather, it
is that the students have allowed their academic skills to degenerate by not
using those skills.
The
students are victims of the gap between being able to use a skill and the
subsequent loss of the skill. If a skill such as writing or math is not used in
a certain amount of time it will be lost. Some lose their skills slowly, but
everyone will lose their skills if enough time passes without the skills being
used.
Summer
vacations are harmful to students since most do not continue to use their
academic skills, in fact, most do not open a book the entire vacation. When the
students come back to school, the first two months are getting back to where
the students were before the summer vacation. What a waste of academic time.
The
benefits of three months off are: janitors can leisurely wax floors, teachers
get summer jobs or return to college and parents can send the kids to
relatives. Students work on their tans, play video games late at night and
sleep until noon.
The three
months off looks like everyone gets what they want. In the short term that is
true, but the tragedy is that in the long term, students are short changed
their proper education by these summer vacations.
At high
school graduation, students are told in glowing terms that they have achieved a
great wisdom. They are finished developing their skills and no longer have to
use these skills regularly. Many high school graduates believe those graduation
speeches.
The truth
is they will achieve wisdom when their kids graduate from high school and not
before. Their high school skills have a shelf life, like bread has a shelf
life. They must use the skills regularly to retain those skills. If, at age twenty-five,
the former students lack skills, most often these skills were lost from lack of
use rather than never having been developed.
Students
must use their academic skills during their days in school and during the rest
of their life. Summer vacations are one of the biggest threats to their ability
to progress in school. It isn’t the vacation per se that harms the student, it
is any time that months pass without the person using their academic skills.
When that
happens some people ask, “Why didn’t those darn schools teach them anything?” The
answer doesn’t matter. Whether they had those academic skills and then lost
them for lack of use or never had those skills, it’s all the same in the end.
They do
not have those skills.
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