Loving English And Summer Holidays

There are some more students at Alcudia's Bellevue hotel complex. They are not like the others. They are younger, some of them very young. They are summer school students. Some wear t-shirts bearing the legend "Love English". The youngest ones play games and sing songs in learning their English. This is how it should be. Not the idiots' guide to idiotically introduce teaching in English to secondary school maths' pupils: those in the Balearics who, as the PISA assessment data reveal, are already lousy at maths.

Summer school camps for learning English are a good idea. Any summer camp probably seems a good idea to Spanish parents. From mid-June to mid-September the long hot summer school holidays last. Idyllic for children. Hell for parents. Nowhere has longer summer holidays than Spain. No schoolchildren enjoy longer summers than those of Spain. How their British counterparts must envy them. All those weeks off and sun as well. It doesn't, in a child's world, get any better. One quarter of the year is devoted to summer holidays. When they're older, they will remember thinking that holidays just went on forever. And they did. Very much more so than an English child from the early 1960s thought the same. At what age do children truly acquire a sense of time, a temporal appreciation? Presumably when they start borrowing phrases from their parents. Doesn't time fly. I can't believe it's nearly Christmas. Where did the summer go?

In Mallorca, as with the rest of Spain, a sense of time is in any event not as it is in other countries. Time is movable, it lacks definition and exactness. Mañana could just as easily be next year as tomorrow, or morning. Mediodía? Who knows where it starts and where it ends. Oh the vagueness of media horita. Time, though, has its importance. It does encroach in a formal manner upon a society generally ill-equipped to understand the rigidities imposed by time. For Mallorcan and Spanish schoolchildren, therefore, it is evaluated in terms of the hours they spend at school, which are not as short as some might believe. Nevertheless, in the Balearics they have spoken about the need for more hours. Perhaps they need the extra hours to compensate for the quarter of the year when hours, in a child's mind, may as well not exist and when time stands still.

Spain, for a country where an acquaintance with the formalities of time can seem distant, does devote a great deal of its time to temporal study. This is surely a consequence of societal ambivalence to its meaning, is it not? Maybe, but more pragmatically there is an ongoing debate regarding the hours of working days, changing from Central European Time, abandoning the siesta, redefining lunch (and so therefore mediodía) and also evening. And when it comes to schooling, in addition to possible extensions to the school day, there is a debate over the summer holidays. Might Mallorca's children soon be cursing their luck as much as British or German children do?

The head of Spain's IMF distance learning business school is just one who has called for there to be shorter holidays. Business in general appears to agree with him, as do some parents' bodies. One consequence of the long holidays is that children, after some thirteen weeks away from the classroom, forget why it was that they were going to school and also forget how it was. How to learn, how to study.

There is of course a good reason for the length of the summer holidays: the heat. It isn't conducive to learning, but there again, with air-conditioned classrooms need this be an issue? But then the heat, albeit of the mornings and with the aid of some shade doesn't seem to deter the summer school attendees of Bellevue.

If there is a concern about the loss of the routine of learning and study over the long holidays, then the summer camps make plenty of sense. And if the kids are learning English, then so much the better. But these are camps, for the most part, for parents who can pay. The disadvantaged remain disadvantaged. It's fanciful to think, even for the current regional government, that funds would be made available for universal language-learning summer camps. That might not be such a bad investment, but there is only so much spare accommodation knocking around.

While there is the great Spanish debate about time, there is the even greater debate about education, exemplified in Mallorca by the row over trilingual teaching and now the provisions of the national LOMCE curriculum for improved educational quality. Part of it should be about the summer holiday. Three months are too long. They create too great an imbalance in the learning routine. They should be shorter.


Index for July 2015

Alcúdia, Bellevue and Spanish students - 4 July 2015
All-inclusives - 25 July 2015
Calvia and cinema tourism - 6 July 2015
Children's entertainment and fiestas - 12 July 2015
Constitutional challenge to Balearic retail legislation - 22 July 2015
Fadrí fiesta, Moscari - 26 July 2015
Fiesta sameyness - 28 July 2015
Flamenco: not loved in Mallorca? - 14 July 2015
Francina Armengol government - 8 July 2015
IB3 broadcaster - 27 July 2015
In-store music - 15 July 2015
Jewel races - 19 July 2015
José Ramón Bauzá senator - 13 July 2015
July fiestas - 7 July 2015
Mallorcan nobility - 24 July 2015
Nepotism allegation: IB-Salut - 10 July 2015
Partido Popular succession - 20 July 2015
Political pacts in Mallorca - 30 July 2015
Politicians' holidays - 29 July 2015
Resort architecture and planning - 21 July 2015
Salvador Hedilla - first flight from Barcelona - 3 July 2015
School summer holidays - 31 July 2015
Summer in Mallorca - 9 July 2015
The Beatles in Spain - 2 July 2015
Too many tourists - 16 July 2015
Torrent de Pareis concert - 5 July 2015
Tourism in government structures - 1 July 2015
Tourism ministry appointments - 18 July 2015
Tourist tax - 11 July 2015, 17 July 2015, 23 July 2015