7 Reasons Not to Let the Government Educate your Child - Reason #7

The final reason in this list against government education is perhaps most visible right now.  Kids are right now coming off of summer vacation and going back to school.  When it comes to the high school age and below, it is not often that you start new fields.  They do exist (and these new fields are exempt from this reason), but you only take maybe two per year at most, if at all.  What I mean by "new fields" are classes that you didn't take a previous iteration of them the semester before.  For example, shop class is a new field (at first).  So is Spanish I (but not Spanish II).  Most of the classes you take in high school are just more advanced versions of what you took in middle school, and even elementary school.  I took English all throughout my schooling, as I did Social Studies, Science, and Math.

For these core classes that you take year after year, schools typically waste about 2 weeks per year because of two words:

Summer.  Vacation.

Anyone who does any sort of independent learning knows extremely well how awful it is to spend 3 entire months without studying a subject.  You get rusty.  When I spend extended time away from Hebrew, I start to forget some of the morphology.  What that means is that when I go back to studying it, I have to delay learning new material, because I need remedial education just to get me back to where I was at before!

It is the same thing for math, or history, or science.  Teachers spend the first part of the school year going back over what they taught right before summer vacation.

What has homeschooling to do with this?  When we looked previously at how inflexible government schooling is time-wise (Reason #5), I mentioned that there was another facet to schools' inflexibility.  We now come to this facet, which is that schools have standardized summer vacation as a break.  It does not matter what your parents do for a living.  It does not matter if you are really interested in a subject.  We won't teach you.  Not now.  You'll have to wait until August, or study by yourself.

Some may defend Summer Vacation.  Some students will spend their time at a summer job.  Some students will spend their time reading ahead for next year's classes.  These are both valid points.  However, the problem is that most students will do absolutely nothing during their vacation.  Video games, TV, and gobs of Internet usage headlined my summer vacation, and I have reason to suspect that most kids do not veer far away from my itinerary.

Homeschooling allows us to break that awful chain.  Does that mean that our children never get any break, ever?  Not at all! We, as a homeschool, can (just as an example, this concept is entirely fluid) spend the summer months one week on, one week off.  We can take the last few weeks of August off, and then "start" school back up in at the beginning of September.  Birthdays?  Holidays?  Automatically off.  It allows us to enjoy the benefits of summer, while pushing forward in education, and removing that remedial section found in the public schools.

When I was a child, I thought like a child.  I reasoned like a child.  I thought that summer vacation was great. But when I became a man, I put away childish things.  I realized that summer vacation simply does more harm than good.