The long and winding road back to school

Photo credit: ©Izabela Urbaniak 2016 

‘In the summer, the days were long, stretching into each other. Out of school, everything was on pause and yet happening at the same time, this collection of weeks when anything was possible.’ – Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride

Let’s imagine that you wanted to organise a summer music festival for teenagers from all over Europe. What would be the best time to maximise attendance? The answer is simple. If you consult the Eurydice publication ‘Organisation of school time in Europe’ you will find out that every child attending a public school in Europe is on holiday in the third week of July. What a perfect date!
However, you should also bear in mind that by this time, the Portuguese will be quite relaxed, not only from celebrating victory in the Euro 2016 tournament, but also from having been on holiday for several weeks, and with many more to come before they run out of the 13 weeks at their disposal. The English, on the other hand, will be excited to be on the first of only 6 weeks holiday, while the Danish will already be organising their school bags as they approach the end of their 8 weeks summer break.
Indeed in the length of holidays as in most things, European countries all display little differences. This does not, however, mean that children in countries where there are long holidays receive less schooling. For example, the Eurydice publication ‘Recommended Annual instruction time in Full-time Compulsory Education in Europe 2015/16’ tells us that at lower secondary level, German children receive a total of 907 hours of schooling and have 6 weeks summer break, while in Italy there are 990 hours of schooling per year despite a summer break of 13 weeks. The issue has more to do with the distribution of holidays: some countries have short and frequent breaks, and others have fewer but longer vacations. But is there any educational reasoning behind these differences, and is there an ideal length for school holidays?
Those who argue in favour of short summer holidays point out that most of us do not have long breaks during our adult lives, and believe that this school tradition is inherited from earlier agrarian societies when children needed to help families in the summer harvest. Moreover, research into the relationship between learning and the biological clock, such as that of the French psychologist François Testu, shows that ideally children would have two weeks holiday after every seven weeks of study.
Research findings also seem to endorse the idea that school breaks produce a dip in reading, writing and maths skills. Of course, this should lead us to ask what else children are experiencing and learning during the summer, and if it is enriching and valuable, rather than assuming that children need more of the same. Indeed many argue that long holidays have positive benefits on children. These come from the change of routines, the opportunities of having time at their disposal and the freedom from school rules. They argue that boredom stimulates the capacity of children to be imaginative, and that a stimuli-rich society is reducing our capacity to be creative. Moreover, long holidays give time to families to reunite, and to share time and experiences.
While long holidays may often sound idyllic, this is not everyone’s reality. Working parents are confronted with challenges to keep children safe and occupied, and that brings costs that are not affordable to all. Indeed, maybe the strongest argument against long school holidays is that they may increase inequality. A child from a well-resourced home environment has very different opportunities to a child from a home with poorer social, cultural and economic capital. Some evidence seems to indicate that youth crime increases in the summer, suggesting that boredom and freedom may lead children along difficult paths. In some countries this has led to proposals to reduce summer holidays and reshape the school calendar. However, might it not be over-optimistic to hope that more school will solve problems of wider societal disadvantage?
As in many education debates, there are valid arguments in favour of opposing visions. Yet between the two opposites could there be space to imagine new solutions? Rather than focusing on the length of holidays should we not think more about what schools can actually offer? How diverse, interesting and driven by real-life experience are they? How autonomous and engaged do children become through going to school? Maybe summer holidays are an opportunity for experimenting with innovative ways of using school buildings and exploring new ideas, allowing children to imagine, create and manage their learning environment. Summer holidays could also be an opportunity to connect more with local communities, to work with NGOs, and to undertake projects for which there is no time during the school year. Doing things differently in the summer could lead to doing things better in general. And rather than teenagers looking around for summer festivals, in the future we could see more students producing their own festivals at school.

Authors: ‘Birch Peter and Cordero Hoyo Elena’

The purposes of education

‘Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife’ – John Dewey, The Need of an Industrial Education in an Industrial Democracy (1916).

In the aftermath of the shocking attacks in Paris and Copenhagen in early 2015, the Ministries of Education of the European Union met to discuss the role that education could play in countering the terror brought to our cities. The result was the Paris declaration, a text focusing on the promotion of citizenship and the common values of freedom, tolerance and non-discrimination through education. Ministries agreed that education’s primary purpose ‘is not only to develop knowledge, skills, competences and attitudes’ but to nourish and transmit the fundamental values of our societies. With even more deadly terrorist acts following in Paris last November, and with the crisis that Europe lives as a result of the exodus of populations fleeing wars and extremism, the messages contained in that declaration are becoming ever more relevant.

Various Education for All Global Monitoring Reports show that education plays a crucial role in enhancing mutual respect, understanding and tolerance, and in reducing feelings of injustice in society. Eurydice is but one organisation that has responded to today’s challenges by developing a new project on citizenship education, following a previous report published in 2012. But collectively, could we do more?

In recent decades, skills, competences and employment have been key words in the discourse around education. Cyclical global economic crises have focused attention on measuring education outputs. Accountability of education systems has been restricted to such goals with the view that an education system that is not able to produce more and better jobs is a non-functioning system.

Preparing people for their future professional life remains a necessity – there is no young unemployed person in Europe who would disagree. However, education does more than prepare people for jobs, and the Paris declaration opens a discussion on education’s other purposes. So, what are the purposes of education?

John Dewey talked about growth. In his view educative experiences would give learners the capacity, confidence and opportunity to engage in new experiences without a pre-ordered aim. Rather, by involving students in setting the learning objectives, the educational experience would become meaningful and relevant to the needs and interests of the new generations. His thinking was very much in line with those who see education at the heart of innovation and societal development.

Many critical theorists, however, have illustrated how education serves to reproduce societal structures with its inequalities and power struggles, while also carrying the potential to achieve more inclusive and equal societies. Thus Antonio Gramsci looked at how literacy can both emancipate people and perpetuate cultural hegemony; Paulo Freire pleaded for the pedagogy of the oppressed, while Pierre Bourdieu saw education as a means to reinforce and perpetuate difference between social classes. Such thinkers have contributed to our understanding that education is anything but neutral, and that the idealism that animates many working in education should be tempered by the realisation that certain approaches may reproduce the inequity that educators strive to combat.

For example, while most people would agree that education should aim to reduce social inequalities, they might have different ideas on how to achieve this. Some focus on standardized testing, aiming to ensure comparable outcomes for all learners. The Eurydice publication on National tests shows that this is the practice in most European countries, and this is especially true when it comes to the basic skills. Others counter that we should talk about equal opportunities, allowing each individual to make free choices in line with personal interest and talent. Sir Ken Robinson, for example, is the digital age’s high preacher for an education that allows people to fulfil their personal passion and talent.

However, it is easier to identify a problem than to solve it, and no one has yet provided a feasible blueprint of an education system that guarantees equal opportunities despite the efforts put in place in many European countries, for example to reduce drop-out rates.

So where do these ideas lead us? First of all, we should recognise that education is called upon to fulfil many personal and societal demands that may at times be incompatible. So collectively we need to find a way of prioritising what we want from our education systems. Secondly, education needs to adapt to changing priorities in societies: there is no single purpose and we should stop expecting that what we have learned should necessarily be learned by our children. Thirdly, the view on the purposes of education will inevitably inform structures, curriculum, teacher training programmes, assessment, and so on. We must ensure at all times that the vision on education is relevant for the people we are educating and the world they will be living in.

Dewey was certainly right in stating that every generation must reinvent democracy, and education must remain at the heart of our democracies, with educators ensuring that the new-born comes to life.