Italian mothers revolt over length of school holidays

Campaign calls on government to extend scholastic year so children spend more time in class and less having to be looked after at home

Mothers in Italy have launched a campaign to reduce the length of the country’s school holidays because they are sick of entertaining their children for 14 weeks over the summer.
There is a growing revolt against the long break, with mothers in particular appealing to the government for reform. They want the scholastic year extended so that kids spend more time in the classroom and less time driving their long-suffering parents to distraction.
An online petition to have the school year changed and the summer holidays reduced has already attracted more than 60,000 signatures.
The petition was drawn up by a children’s charity called We World and an irreverent blog run by two activist mothers called MammadiMerda, which loosely translates as “sh—y mum”.
They intend to present the petition to the education minister in a bid to open up a serious political debate about shortening the school holidays.
Sarah Malnerich and Francesca Fiore, the women behind the blog, say that Italy has the longest school summer holidays in the world alongside Malta and Latvia.
They point out that the 14 week-long summer holiday was originally instituted so that children could help their parents work in the fields and bring in the harvest.
“Society has changed since then, but the school year has remained frozen in time,” Ms Fiore told The Telegraph. “I find it absurd that schools close down for three months of the year.”
Many more Italian women now work compared to the past, when their mothers and grandmothers were content – or at least resigned – to looking after the kids all summer while their husbands went to work.
“We’re stuck with the old agriculture-based calendar when kids had to stop school in June to work in the fields, but that was 100 years ago,” one exasperated mother, Chiara Faggioli, 34, an architect with two children, told La Repubblica newspaper.
Families rely on a hotchpotch of solutions to survive the endless summer months. Some are lucky enough to have grandparents nearby, who take care of children during the day. Others resign themselves to having their kids glued to screens for most of the day while they work from home.
Millions of others have to pay for their offspring to attend summer camps but it comes at considerable cost – an average of 1,200 euros per child.
For families with two or three children, the expense can be a huge burden.
“Don’t trust all those idyllic photos you see on Instagram,” La Repubblica commented. “Summer is a nightmare for hundreds of thousands of Italian families.”
Even those lucky enough to go on holiday for two or perhaps three weeks still have 11 weeks to try to fill. “That’s nearly 80 days – the time it took Phileas Fogg to go round the world,” the paper noted.
If children are to remain in school into July, rather than breaking up in early June, then air conditioning will be essential.
“Hardly any classrooms have air con at the moment,” said Ms Fiore. “Climate change means it is going to get even hotter in Italy. We need government investment so that every school in the country has air con. If not, what are we going to do in 15 years’ time when it could be 40C from May to September?”