Eleven Weeks for a Harvest Nobody Brings In Anymore

Even in Germany, summer always left me puzzled. Six consecutive weeks of school closure never struck me as a considered decision, but as something that had grown historically and no longer fitted. A relic everyone had come to accept because it had always been that way. Honestly, it felt wrong to me, even if I couldn't quite say why.

Then we moved to Hungary, and quiet puzzlement turned into genuine astonishment. Instead of six weeks there were suddenly eleven. We did the maths, we read the calendar twice: eleven weeks? That jump transformed my vague discomfort into a clear conviction. The long, rigid school holidays should be abolished — and if you think it through to the end, fixed school holidays altogether. But one step at a time.

Hungary: six weeks become eleven

In Germany, summer holidays last about six weeks depending on the federal state, staggered across different dates so that not half the country travels at the same time. In Hungary there is no staggering. There is one date, nationwide, on the same day. The school year ends in mid-June — in 2026 the last day is 20 June — and doesn't begin again until 1 September. That's roughly eleven consecutive weeks, the longest break of the year.

The catch is in the detail. Crèche and kindergarten — in Hungarian bölcsőde and óvoda — continue through the summer, apart from a few closed weeks. While children are small, you're covered. With starting school that disappears, and suddenly eleven weeks loom that parents must now handle themselves. The solution is mainly summer camps, in Hungarian tábor, usually booked week by week. Anyone wanting to fill eleven weeks strings one camp after another, each with its own registration, its own location and its own packing list — an organisational job alongside the actual job.

So the long summer is not a gift to the family. It is a task that the school hands over and the parents must solve. Hungary just makes bigger and more visible what had already bothered me in Germany.

What holidays were once for

The long summer holidays are not a law of nature and not a pedagogical concept. They are a remnant of a world that no longer exists.

For centuries, the everyday life of most families was determined by agriculture, and children were not merely pupils but labourers. School-free time was aligned with harvest periods. There were hay holidays around Whitsun, harvest holidays for the grain harvest in summer, potato holidays in autumn, and in wine-growing regions holidays for the grape harvest. Children's hands were needed for turning hay, picking up potatoes, bringing in the grain. The holidays were not rest — they were harvest help.

In the interest of honesty, two further roots belong here. The so-called dog-days holidays: in the hottest weeks, lessons in poorly ventilated rooms were barely bearable, so school was let out. And the church calendar, which prescribed breaks around the great festivals. But the long summer block — the one we're talking about — was shaped in its length and timing primarily by the harvest.

The sentence that said it all

There is a moment when this change was literally put on record. In a Bavarian municipality, it was only in November 1964 that the separate harvest and autumn holidays were merged into consolidated summer holidays. The reasoning given in the minutes consists of just one laconic sentence: "The children are no longer needed for field work."

You cannot record the end of a principle more soberly than that. The reason summer holidays existed at all had been dealt with. What came after was not a new meaning, but administration: the Hamburg Agreement of 1964 regulated the number of holiday days, later came the staggering of summer holidays — not for pedagogical reasons, but to spread travel traffic and relieve holiday resorts. The fact that Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg still have the latest holidays to this day is expressly a legacy of the old harvest times.

We have thus preserved a structure whose justification we ourselves had discarded. The children are no longer needed for field work — and the holidays have remained, in full length.

What remains of the reason

Today, almost nobody still connects summer holidays with their origin. They are considered a self-evident time for rest. But when you ask what purpose the long, rigid block at the end of the school year actually serves today, the answer becomes thin.

It no longer serves the harvest. It does not fit families in which both parents have long been working and nobody at home is waiting for eleven free weeks. It forces families to travel precisely in the most expensive and crowded weeks of the year, because everyone has time off simultaneously. And it produces the childcare stress I know from the Hungarian summer, which also exists in a milder form in Germany. Those hardest hit are the families who have the least room to manoeuvre in the first place.

My proposal: school without holidays

My proposal is therefore more radical than the usual holiday debate envisages: a school without holidays. By this I don't mean a school without free time, but a school that — like almost every other part of our lives — is open throughout the year, one in which children and teachers alike take their holiday the way the working world has long done: as a personal entitlement, flexible, whenever it fits.

Instead of the whole country coming to a standstill simultaneously in summer, every child would have a fixed quota of free weeks distributed across the year — precisely when the parents are able to take leave. Children and parents would finally have time off at the same time, planned and together, rather than spending weeks organising childcare while the parents work. Teachers would also take their holidays in a staggered fashion, as is standard in any other profession that operates year-round.

The expensive, overcrowded high summer would lose its compulsion. Families could go to the sea in May, to the mountains in October, to the grandparents in February — whenever it works for them. The holiday would follow the family, not the family follow the school calendar. And the always-open school would be there for all who cannot freely choose a free week: as a reliable place, not as a hole in the calendar.

What speaks against it, and what doesn't

I don't want to make it too easy for myself, so let me address the serious objections.

The most obvious concerns teachers. Long holidays are today also recovery from a demanding profession, and year-round operation would need enough staff for anyone to take staggered leave at all. The second part I take seriously: without enough teachers and without fair conditions, none of this works — and certainly not at their expense.

The first part, however, I turn around. Pupils in Germany today have around 63 school-free working days a year, roughly twelve weeks. If instead they received, like the working world, thirty days of annual leave, that would be about six fewer free weeks — and thus six more weeks of schooling. But this time would not mean more material, but the same material spread over more days. That eases performance pressure, creates space to catch up on missed work, and ultimately also reduces the burden on teachers: whoever has more time for the same curriculum needs to rush through it less. School without holidays would then not be more work at once, but less pressure over the whole year.

The second objection is heat. The old dog-days holidays had a real reason, and climate change is strengthening it. That's true — but it argues for a break in the hottest weeks, not for a rigid block by fixed calendar. Heat relief can be solved more precisely than with a quarter-year standstill.

The third concerns the lessons themselves: when children are absent at different times, a class is harder to lead as a unit. This is a real pedagogical challenge. Schools already cope with sick days, and more individual learning can help — but I don't want to deny the problem.

And finally, fairness — the objection closest to my heart. A flexible model benefits first the families with flexible jobs. Precisely for this reason, the proposal stands or falls with the always-open school: it must be a reliable, good, free place for every child whose parents cannot freely choose their holiday. Built properly, a school without holidays solves the childcare problem better than the current system — built wrongly, it would pass it downward.

What I'm for in the end

The eleven Hungarian weeks are no gift if you spend them ferrying children from one camp to the next while you yourself work. And the six German weeks are no better, just shorter. Both follow a rhythm made for a world in which children had to go to the fields in summer.

The harvest has long since been brought in, and children were never needed for it; a Bavarian municipality put that on record as long ago as 1964. It would be time for the calendar to follow suit. Not so that children have less time off, but so that they can spend their free time with the people who then actually have time.

— Andreas Kurt Peter Reuter