Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Obama wants more School...



There has always been a lot of competitions between many countries in sorts of things ranging from economies to Education. President Obama and the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are looking into putting the American Education system into the same standards as other countries, but in order to do that they want to cut summer vacations for students. According to Duncan, the American school calendar still goes by agrarian lifestyle. Students in the US, normally go to school between the hours of 7:30am to 3:00p.m., Monday to Friday and have two and a half months of summer vacation. They want to extend the school day three hours everyday so students are in school from 7:30-5:00p.m. or they want to cut summer vacation to only four-weeks. They would also add classes on Saturdays. This increase in hours of school, would help students boost state testing and would better prepare students for further learning.

I believe that adding more school hours is wrong. We already spend 180 days out of the 365 days in school. Our summer vacations is something that has always been there and up to now has worked fine. One of the reasons that I am against it is because children spend less and less time exploring different creative outlooks. There is a lot of math, science and English in schools but there is no art, music or gym. Children start school earlier than kids did ten or twenty years ago. Children are starting school as early as fifteen months of age. They don't nearly get enough time to be children and play outside.


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