Year-Round School: Pros & Cons

The debate whether school should be year-round or not remains hot for some years now in a number of countries across the world. Many parents and educators consider school holidays to be unnecessary long.

In Dubai, and in the UAE in general, most parents are truly surprised by the number of holidays and the length of an academic year, which is set at 180 days by the government although most of the schools reduce the number of days in the course of the year.

Recently released, bellow international average math tests results of the Dubai pupils are a convincing argument in support of parents concerns in regards to the quality of education that local schools offer.

On the other hand, investors in education believe that a year-round school system will require more money and efforts. In addition, parents and more precisely housewives who got used to lengthily holidays worry that they may not be able to cope with such a schedule.

Recently, there was a huge discussion in the U.S. about the length of the school year. Experts believed that schooling should become a year-round process. Parents, on the other hand, disagreed with that. A few weeks ago, however the U.S. government decided not increase the amount of the 180 school days. That may be because taking up this system cannot happen overnight. It requires lots of preparation, both material and strategical. In addition, a year-round school would affect not only the lives of the people who work in the education sector, but also those of the children and their parents. Also, peopple who work in the public transport and service sector would need to conform their workdays with the long school year.

Like most things in life, the year-round school has its good and bad sides. Let’s take a look at some of the most important pros and cons of the prolonged school year.

Cons

Year-round education may be an expensive undertaking. Parents will have to pay more and in Dubai this means a lot, because schools are very very expensive. Many parents may simply not be able to afford it.

For schools would be easier, as they already pay rents for their campuses and salaries for their holidaying teachers.

Another downside of this idea is that kids will have difficulties spending an entire day at school, especially in smaller and older schools with limited facilities. Children have a short attention span and they easily get tired and bored. Once kids feel weary or bored, they start to behave badly and they become harder to control. In other words, more time at school doesn’t mean more academic knowledge.

The longer school days would mean less after-school sport and activities, unless the school strongly relays of after-school activities as a method for attracting more parents. Most of the additional training and education is done in the daytime. The new system, however, would push them in the dark hours of the day which is not safe for kids. Also, children would be too tired to effectively participate in these activities.

Pros

In the year-round school system, breaks are small and take place at even periods of time. That is bad news for kids since their summer holiday won’t be long. However, that also means that children will lose less knowledge during the holidays. In other words, they won’t need to go to a summer school in order to refresh or catch up with the school material. During the current academic year, Dubai’s school holidays occur every three or four weeks, which is very distracting for students, while a big relief for teachers.

In addition, during the long summer school break, most parents are busy working. As a result, some children are left unattended. That can be dangerous. Also, a kid locked at home alone is equal to a lost childhood.

Bottom Line

It is true that the school summer break is too long. However, switching to a year-round school schedule would be a struggle for schools, teachers, parents and, most of all, children. But in all cases, the school holidays in Dubai are so many and so long that many teachers feel like on a holiday whole year long.