For students in Italy these are days of celebration for the end of lessons and the beginning of the summer closure of schools. But around the corner there is already a new commitment that will keep them ideally linked to life among the schools: homework for the holidays. The debate is age-old and comes up again every June. Is it right or not to assign them? “The torment of homework for the holidays affects 6 million students and their families struggling with the problem of convincing their children to leave the sea, friends and games to carve out a daily space for books and notebooks”. The advantages? “Nobody”, for the pediatrician Italo Farnetani, the protagonist of a long-standing battle against the studio in the warm season. According to him, in fact, “there is no valid psycho-pedagogical motivation and it is not an educational practice. In fact, the opposite: it risks being uneducational”, he assures Adnkronos Salute.
The children’s white coat explains that his ‘crusade’ also has “the approval of the families: 86% of parents are against assignment – highlights -. Summer holidays have already existed since previous centuries and were not created to give teachers a long break, but to let students rest. Things learned and memorized in childhood have the quality of being indelibleso much so that they are the last to disappear in elderly people with memory disorders. Three months of interruption from studying, therefore, will not affect them“. And then there’s the heat factor: high temperatures, the expert reports, “create stress on the organism and reduce learning. Sstudying listlessly, dragging your homework around all summer, is the perfect way to acquire a bad habit that you risk carrying with you for the entire school period”.
Farnetani conducted several in-depth studies on the topic of holiday homework: “It appears from the statistics that emerged that 30% of students, that is, almost 2 million students, get rid of their thoughts as soon as possible and by July they will have completed what was assigned by the teachers. In other words, it is something that is experienced as a burden to be lifted quickly. 62%, on the other hand, drag their homework with them throughout the summer. 2% close the practice in August, 4% in September, 2% don’t do it at all“, he lists.
“If you summarize the disadvantages of holiday homework, all that remains is to advise teachers not to assign them and parents to carry out ‘civil disobedience’and send their children to school without having completed their homework, making a justification” explaining the reasons for the choice. “Even though I understand that there are few teachers who check them when they return to school.”
Holiday homework, the three negative aspects
Farnetani outlines the negative aspects of holiday homework in 3 points. “The first it is the excessive cost for families to buy books and other media – lists – the second it is the stress that holiday tasks determine in the student, who will thus never be able to implement appropriate resilience from the stress caused by learning. I am a great advocate of studying, and I would also make school compulsory at least until the age of 18, but in the summer holidays you have to ‘switch off’. Just imagine: the whole world is on holiday, it’s hot, the cities are empty, people are having fun, and a child has to study in front of a book.”
The third point According to the full professor of pediatrics at the Ludes University-United Campus of Malta, the disadvantage of summer homework is “the one-sided nature of the education of children and adolescents. It is true that the school is the most important cultural and educational body organized and complex, but the months of summer holidays are useful precisely for being able to give multilateralism to learning, training, the acquisition of new experiences and the experimentation of different lifestyles. Summer is a way to carry out activities different from the period of the school year, to do more sport, explore the environment more. Each parent will have to organize their child’s days based on the preferences of the adolescent child and will have to do so by freeing him/her from constraints, lifestyles, habits and rhythms. of the school. I recommend – he concludes – to let the kids live in the open air, to play sports and be among people, and have new experiences such as dedicating themselves to fishing for example, a practice that they really like. But also going for a walk, socializing, going to places with entertainment.”
