Abolish the fixed school holidays!

What comes after a lifetime of travelling? Short journeys? Travelling home? Not travelling at all? An ice age? Or just keep travelling? On a short trip to visit a good old kiteboarding friend behind the Swabian Alb, I realise that I’ve only been kitesurfing for 1:40 hours all year. That’s the lowest figure for a quarter of a century – and clearly too little for a good life and healthy body tension.

But my father urges me to take responsibility. So we go on a four-day short family holiday with a tent in Baden-Württemberg instead of a solo flight with the kites. The little one rejoices with the three children of our friends. Together with our friends, we spend short yet far too long nights finding out what family-friendly kitesurfing destinations are still affordable during the holiday season.

Why can’t every family with school-age children take two to three weeks off holiday once a year? With a little control and digital learning, there should be hardly any gaps in knowledge. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who can do it can do it themselves.

But what is Germany doing? It has just filed charges against numerous families who fly off on holiday with their school-age child three days before the start of the holiday. Hello, three days! A typical last week of school before the summer holidays: Monday mini golf, cancelled. Tuesday outdoor pool, cancelled. Thursday at 9.30 a.m. shift in the pit. Dear paragraph riders: what went so damn wrong in your childhood on the last three days of school before the summer holidays? Was it the three school assignments? Or was it just the school year coming to a cosy end with no lessons?

The Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Education has just realised that 1,400 full-time apprenticeships were not filled for 20 years due to an “IT error”. You have to understand the police at Stuttgart Airport: If the teachers aren’t there, then please at least let the local pupils sit out their free periods before the summer holidays! The parents could simply have saved a few hundred euros – and often a quick 50% over four days – by bringing the holidays forward.

School is particularly important for socialising. But also for learning together. Helping each other. Being there for each other. I learnt this quite a lot as a media teacher after Corona. Something as complex and constantly evolving as school education should not be forced into a rigid time frame like school holidays. My arguments?

Fixed holiday periods ensure concentrated tourism. They are per se highly damaging to the environment and incompatible. Fixed holiday periods cause nothing but problems at home and abroad. Especially with the immense price increases after Corona and especially in Germany, lower-earning families today often simply no longer have the opportunity to somehow manage family holidays at double and triple the price. Why shouldn’t they have a few hundred euros extra if they leave a few days earlier and take care of their children’s online learning for three hours a day during their holiday away from school holidays? Oh yes: when will the livestream from the classroom finally be available?

Reducing class sizes. Especially today, when practically every teacher is increasingly complaining about the high proportion of pupils from other countries who need support, a temporary reduction in class sizes through announced and authorised absences would alleviate the situation. Teachers could take better care of fewer pupils and support them more.

Learning together! The holidays are the only time when parents have time to learn together with their children. But school is not in session during the school holidays. Only a family holiday away from the school holidays would allow parents to get involved in their children’s education in a targeted and “live” way. I would love to do that. But do any of you really believe that the child would be happy about additional parental learning support during the school holidays? Certainly not! That would only be possible during school hours, i.e. outside the school holidays.

So, dear Germany? Why don’t we allow (at least the good pupils) two to three weeks’ holiday away from school holidays? Of course, no one is allowed to miss schoolwork. Homework must be submitted digitally. Parents must guarantee that their children will continue to learn and be supervised during the “holidays”. What’s so damn hard about a little flexibility?

We spend three days camping on a small lake, on mountains, in a cave and on a farm in just under 35 degrees. At night, the Perseids roar across the starry sky to our cries of joy. Unfortunately, our plan to paddle the upper Danube in our new canoe is cancelled due to a lack of water. At least the thunderstorm that had been forecast for days didn’t hit us until we were travelling back to Holledau.

I’m working. I’m looking forward to a visit home from world-travelling friends. Offering myself online as a kite trip planner. I dream of travelling and look for any flights to windy kite spots that are still somehow affordable. But even away from the school holidays, all flights are simply far too expensive this year. Price increases of easily 50% plus compared to the previous year are now the standard for flights to the Sinai. But I’m simply not prepared to pay the same for a 3.5-hour flight without water as I did two years ago for a 16-hour flight to the Philippines with good food…