Changing the dates of school holidays to “deseasonalize” tourism: no more three summer months and 20 days at Christmas, but more fragmented breaks throughout the school year.
The proposal is not made by the Minister of Education Valditara (who is holding back), but by the Minister of Tourism Daniela Santanché, who from the International Tourism Forum in Milan outlines in detail a revision of the school calendar.
We intend to propose a gradual alignment of the school calendar to more modern European models – announces Santanché – to encourage internal flows. Our school calendar concentrates holidays mainly in two periods of the year, unlike what happens in most other Western countries, where school breaks are divided in a more balanced way throughout the year. This peculiarity does not facilitate internal tourism. For this reason, we are talking with my colleague Valditara to start a process of discussion and work on a gradual revision of the school plans.
Yes true, but…
However, Minister Santanché’s enthusiasm was immediately scaled down by the Ministry of Education. At the moment, they explain from Viale Trastevere, there are no operational proposals to work on for a revision of the school calendar. Attention is focused on other priorities, starting with the issue of safety in institutions and the possibility of introducing metal detectors to prevent weapons from entering schools.
Meanwhile, the proposal launched by the Minister of Tourism to review the school calendar to encourage tourist flows has already sparked political conflict, mostly focusing on the urgency of rather renovating schools that are falling apart, reviewing ridiculous salaries and accompanying students left behind. But the reaction front is not united. The Anief union, for example, says it is in favor of a revision of the calendar, even if for reasons completely different from those of tourism. President Marcello Pacifico is clear:
The school calendar must be rethought in light of climate change and the real infrastructure of our schools. Not to help tourism, but because buildings today are not designed to withstand scorching summers and increasingly extreme winters. In the absence of structural adjustments, lessons must be started later and finished earlier, making up hours during the year. Thinking of keeping schools open in the middle of summer is unrealistic.
And this is where the real crux lies: Santanché’s proposal is politically questionable, in its intentions and tone, but it is not entirely unrealistic from a climate point of view. The Italian school calendar is the result of a country that no longer exists, starting from the long and increasingly hotter summers. Today we have overheated classrooms, ventilation that is often absent, schools built without bioclimatic criteria, students and teachers who work in increasingly tiring physical conditions.
The problem is not “helping tourism”, but acknowledging that climate change is making the current model increasingly less sustainable. In short: the idea of overhauling the school calendar may make sense, but only if it arises from an environmental, health and educational vision, not from a short-term economic logic.
Even before moving dates and holidays, you should seriously invest in:
Without this, any discussion about the calendar remains a shortcut.
The three-month summer vacation
And not only that. There is another aspect that continues to be almost ignored in the debate on the school calendar: the social one. The model of “three month summer vacation“has no longer any reason to exist, the one in which a parent often stayed at home and managing children during the summer was less problematic. Today, in the majority of families, both the father and the mother work, and those three months become an almost impossible fit between expensive summer camps, increasingly elderly grandparents and holidays that rarely exceed three or four weeks in total.
Keeping schools closed for such a long period no longer responds to the real needs of families. Indeed, it creates profound inequality: those who can afford it pay for private services, campuses, babysitters; those who cannot are forced to make do, often leaving the children at home alone or giving up work. This is also a social justice issue.
Reviewing the school calendar could mean better distributing breaks during the year, shortening the summer closure and making the system more compatible with contemporary life. Not to “do tourism a favor”, but to adapt the school to a society that has already changed.
