EdTalk | Is the notion of the ‘summer slide’ a fallacy? Perhaps children should have time to be children
The idea that children will forget what they’ve learned in the last school year over the summer break is a common misconception with serious implications
The summer slide is the widely held and dreaded notion that children will forget significant parts of what they’ve learned in the last school year over the summer break. This is bogus on several different levels, but, as a common misconception with serious implications, it is important to discuss and debunk.
The simplest fallacy with the summer slide comes from a misunderstanding about the nature of learning itself. If you memorised the first 20 digits of pi, recited them to me the next day, and then forgot them the day after, no one would describe that as learning. Learning implies a long-term acquisition of knowledge, skills, or competencies. Learning that is lost by taking a few weeks away from the classroom was never good learning to begin with. Shallow learning and rote memorisation of facts are the spilled milk of the summer, and not worth crying over.
Learning that is lost by taking a few weeks away from the classroom was never good learning to begin with
Beyond that we can look at real world evidence, and the two countries that seem to get all the limelight in the educational world serve as an excellent demonstration: Finland and South Korea. They consistently top the ranks of global education systems while representing radically different approaches to teaching, and to summer breaks.
Finland has a long summer break of two-and-a-half to three months, whereas the South Korean system has a summer break of less than a month, lasting from late July to mid-August. South Korean students are also much more likely to be subjected to extra summer lessons than their Finnish counterparts, leaving even less of a break than we see on paper. If the summer slide were real, South Korean students should be outperforming the Finns by leaps and bounds, but in their contests for first and second on education rankings it is most often Finland at the top. Hong Kong summer holidays, by comparison, tend to be six to seven weeks long.
Given this evidence, how did this myth of the summer slide come about? We all need time to shake off the cobwebs after a holiday – the same goes for children going back to school. But to hear parents describe it the summer slide sounds like something else entirely.
