All over the world, students get two or more months of holiday during the summer. I believe this is done to give students a chance to explore extracurricular activities, which can help them develop different skills than those gained in school. Furthermore, it can prevent burnout. Some people argue that holidays could be shorter, arguing that students could use more structure especially in their formative years.
Perhaps the value of long school holidays is simple: giving young learners a chance to explore life outside of schools. This helps them in two ways: first, students would have an opportunity to play sports or participate in clubs, which could be crucial to their development, as they interact with different people in unfamiliar environments. Second, doing activities that are different from those they do in schools or just merely relax, prevents burnout and stress-related diseases, such as anxiety, this makes students sustain longer educational paths. For instance: countries where students get long summer holidays such as the USA and Canada, have recorded lower rates of burnout amongst their student, than those countries that do not give long summer holidays, such as China and Japan.
On the other hand, advocates of shorter school holidays argue that the youth could lose focus without the structure schools provide. Their argument stems from the idea that psychologically a neurochemically younger generations are more prone to make grave mistakes especially without guidance. The prefrontal cortex, a brain region responsible for decision-making and analytical-thinking, does not fully develop until the age of 25. Thus, without a clear routine and a structure we, as a society, are maximizing the chances of students making irrational decisions because simply we are providing them with more decisions to make. During the school year students follow strict structure of: waking up time, what subjects they focus on and even what to time to eat, while during a holiday the youth make these decisions on their own. For example, they could easily decide to stay up at night because they do not have to go to school the next day, this alone could negatively impact their physical and mental development.
In conclusion, long holidays provide students with a chance to experience different activities that could be crucial to their development. Moreover, it protects them from burnout and stress. By contrast, long holidays could take away the structure required to keep students away from making irrational decisions.