The ICSE examination ended yesterday for the students of Class 10 and in a few days, our first batch of Class 12 would have taken the ISC examination. The other children will also be completing the year–end academic demands by then. The eagerly awaited summer vacation of different durations will begin for all children immediately after that!

A long vacation is the most unenviable part of school life! It provides time for rest and leisure. It provides the fallow period in which, one need not add to the experiences or knowledge if one chooses to. One can just laze around, unwind, eat, play and make merry! And it is surely well deserved–have human children been designed for attending the assembly line model of schooling for 15 years or have they come about to experience the glory of human existence? Have they not the right to sense the world in myriad ways at least during the vacation?

What we gather during the session settles down in the vacation. One has an opportunity to understand, analyze, break down and assimilate in one’s being the essentials. Usually, a child grows up in many ways during the holidays including in the physical parameters like height and weight. A teacher too rejuvenates and re–invigorates during the vacation to resume the next academic year with new energies. Sometimes the experience of vacation could make a child forget all the mathematics and English that we taught during the previous year! It seems to me that a test of how good a vacation was is whether a child remembers what he learnt prior to vacation.

Unfortunately, for the sensible and thoughtful educators like me and fortunately for many teachers around the world this experience of a good vacation is becoming rare these days. What with the changed perception of parents towards school–education, we subject the children to more directed and focused programs and courses. We trade the precious vacation of children with adult needs of preparing them for “better” adult life. Adults, who have long forgotten their vacations, assume the authority to trade the vacation of a child with preparation of better adult life. Should we treat this as act of ignorance or an act of smartness! Do we know the difference between the two? To deprive he child of a childhood vacation is like depriving a flower of its fragrance. How do we educate children and their parents that we need to educate ourselves such that we can experience human existence properly at every stage of our lives?

As the academic year ends for most children, even I seem to be in a holiday mood! That is not possible for the parent–teacher meeting is round the corner and the extended classes of the board batches are about to commence. The school is in for many intensive activities during the next academic year. Even a few teachers are on campus with me during this summer and maybe we could all together plan some outings!

The vacation of childhood is not available to teachers like me any longer! We need to make do with small “breaks!” The decelerated pace of life on campus during the vacation, when very few people live, makes life rich and reflective. The beauty and serenity of the place becomes palpably regenerating making the onlooker enchanted and ecstatic! The thought of the lovely, slow–paced days ahead makes my heart race towards the summer vacation. I hope our children will be able to enjoy their holidays and vacation in the spirit that the child in me is able to sense even today!