Schools and Gangs

Over the holidays I had a chat with an old friend who is a schoolteacher in Ontario. He mentioned a theory of his that seems to make sense to me. The idea is that by making the school year a year we would help to reduce the ability of gangs to recruit high school aged children. Idle hands are the devil's workshop and by insuring that high school hands are not idle for long, the more sinister will have difficulty influencing them.

I remember those long summer breaks. They could be quite boring and I could get into a lot of trouble if there wasn't anything organised for me. The idea of a long summer break has come and gone. Children are not required to work on the farm any more and the two parent household has to fork out a lot of money to entertain children over the summer. Moreover the children forget so much of what they have learned over the summer that a long break seems a bad idea from a pedagogical point of view.

I am neither a teacher nor a criminologist, so I am not really in a position to speak in much more detail, but, the idea seems sound and worthy of further investigation. It doesn't need to be applied universally, but only where it makes more sense and there are a lot of different ways of applying the idea. The same number of school days can be maintained just spread out differently or another trimester can be added to make busy curricula less so.

There are a lot of ideas out there for dealing with youth and crime, many of them involve programmes, and money. Schooling is one of the biggest and most effective such programmes, why not see if it can be used more effectively.

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