Every June, like clockwork, students are released back into the wild with exactly one month of freedom. Thirty-one days to recover from early mornings, heavy backpacks, perpetual assessments, and the strange existential dread that appears whenever someone says, “This will not be tested… but it’s good to know.” And then, just as students are beginning to remember who they were before school took over their lives, July arrives and school resumes. The question worth pondering is whether one month is truly enough.
On paper, a one-month break sounds generous. In practice, it often feels like a long weekend that got a little too ambitious. The first week is usually spent recovering—sleeping, doing absolutely nothing, and reintroducing oneself to hobbies that had been abandoned sometime around March. The second week is when productivity is optimistically planned. The third week is when guilt creeps in. By the fourth week, students are already mentally preparing for school again, which raises an uncomfortable question: when exactly did the “break” happen?
This leads us to the uncomfortable but necessary thought experiment: what if we extended the June holidays to two months? Or, daringly, three? What if June flowed gently into July, and July wandered lazily into August, and school only resumed after everyone had fully exhaled?
The immediate fear, of course, is that learning would collapse entirely. Students would forget everything, teachers would return to classrooms filled with blank stares, and civilisation as we know it would crumble. Yet research suggests the reality is more nuanced. Studies on rest and cognitive recovery, including work by sleep and learning researchers like Matthew Walker, consistently show that sustained rest improves memory consolidation, emotional regulation, and long-term learning capacity. In other words, learning does not thrive under constant pressure. It needs pauses. Proper ones.
Educational psychology research has also shown that reflection is a key component of meaningful learning. Scholars such as John Dewey argued as early as the 20th century that experience alone is not enough; reflection on experience is what turns activity into growth. A longer break provides something schools rarely give students: time to look back. Time to ask, “What did I actually learn this term?” rather than “What do I need to memorise for the next test?”
Teachers, too, are often forgotten in this discussion, despite being arguably the most exhausted people in the system. Teaching is emotionally demanding work. It requires constant attention, empathy, planning, improvisation, and patience, often all at once. A longer break could offer teachers genuine recovery time, not just enough rest to survive the next term, but enough to rethink their methods, refresh their enthusiasm, and return with something closer to joy than burnout. Teacher burnout is well-documented in educational research, and longer, more meaningful breaks may not be a luxury but a preventive measure.
The most common objection to longer school holidays comes from a very real place: parents. Many parents work full-time and cannot be home for two or three months. The concern is that children will be left alone, bored, or glued permanently to screens. This is not a trivial issue, and it deserves empathy. However, the question remains whether this logistical challenge should dictate how much rest children are allowed to have.
After all, we rarely argue that adults should have shorter holidays because their employers cannot accommodate them. Instead, we explore alternative systems: flexible work arrangements, community programmes, shared caregiving, or holiday enrichment activities. Perhaps the issue is not that children have too much potential free time, but that society has not yet imagined enough ways to support families during it.
Now let us imagine, briefly and without panic, an alternative world where the June holidays last three months, stretching lazily through June, July, and August. What is the worst that could happen? Students might forget some academic content, yes—but forgetting is not the enemy of learning. In fact, relearning after rest is often faster and deeper, because the brain is no longer overloaded. Students might become bored, but boredom has historically been the birthplace of creativity, not its death. Entire hobbies, ideas, and life directions have begun with the sentence, “I was bored one summer.”
There is also the possibility that students might rediscover parts of themselves that school unintentionally sidelines. Reading without a syllabus. Thinking without an outcome. Learning something simply because it is interesting. These experiences rarely show up in report cards, but they matter profoundly in shaping curious, resilient humans.
Of course, a longer break is not a magic solution. It would require thoughtful planning, social support systems, and a shift in how we define productivity and success in education. But perhaps the deeper question is not whether students can afford more rest, but whether we can afford to continue pretending that constant motion equals progress.
One month of holiday may be enough to stop students from collapsing. Two or three months might allow them to actually recover, reflect, and return not just ready to work, but ready to grow. And if that means rethinking how we organise time, support families, and measure learning, then perhaps the holiday debate is really an invitation to rethink education itself—preferably while lying down, doing nothing, and feeling absolutely no guilt about it.
Written by: Adi Jamaludin
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