Board Of The News: It's go, go go for the summer holidays!

http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/the-kids-that-dont-stop-for-the-summer-holidays-20160106-gm06rs.html

While the article makes this initially sound like a bad thing, or it's the parent's fault for pushing all this crap onto their son, I do have to applaud Fairfax for taking a very balanced approach on the subject and trying to avoid it becoming too preachy.

The article specifically does recount what Leon, an 8-year-old boy does during the school holidays. More specifically, he continues practicing his literacy and numeracy skills through an online program called Kumon, practices violin, plays golf, attends karate, swimming and acting classes. This generally gets written off as a bad thing by other sources (i.e. News Corp) or is otherwise seen as a parent pushing it onto their children. In this case, it's actually the other way around and his mum gave him the option to stop, but he refused to!

The experts in the article do also stress the importance of play and that it should be the child's decision to explicitly learn and take things at their own pace during the holidays (i.e. what Leon is doing) and not the parent's decision. I also know this will likely get flames later, with suggestions that letting the kids learn at their own pace is going to turn them "soft" or "stupid" by the time they leave high school. This isn't necessarily the case-the Montessori system relies to some degree on self-paced learning and studies have found that there's no discernable difference between children in the Montessori system and the mainstream (One such study can be found here). In Leon's case, he attends a mainstream school (albeit private) and is praised for his efforts.

One thing that we all tend to forget as well is that children never do stop learning, even if we don't think they are learning. Learning is not just pen-to-paper test, test, test or organised activities/practices. A child for example, would be practicing teamwork, social skills and parenting skills in the home corner at daycare, while they would be practicing their gross motor and creativity skills pretending to be pirates in the playground. Similarly, they might be practicing their reading skills calling out brand names in the shops (there is a name for this: "environmental print") or their maths skills by using play money.


Studies:

 Lopata, Christopher; Wallace, Nancy V; Finn, Kristin V (2005). "Comparison of Academic Achievement Between Montessori and Traditional Education Programs", Journal of Research in Childhood Education 20/1, pp. 5-13