Summer School

"Alexander's work suggests that the way in which education has been discussed in the U.S. is backwards. An enormous amount of time is spent talking about reducing class size, rewriting curricula, buying every student a shiny new laptop, and increasing school funding - all of which assumes that there is something fundamentally wrong with the job schools are doing. But data shows that schools do work. The only problem with school, for the kids who aren't achieving, is that there isn't enough of it.

The causes of Asian math superiority become even more obvious. Students in Asian schools don't have long summer vacations. Why would they? Cultures that believe that the route to success lies in rising before dawn 360 days a year are scarcely going to give their children three straight months off in the summer. The school year in the U.S. is, on average, 180 days long. The South Korean school year is 220 days long. The Japanese school year is 243 days long." - Malcolm Gladwell

There are ups and downs to be had with the type of transformation discussed there. The point that interests me is the reaffirmation that success in multiple areas, whether music or play or learning, comes in proportion to work.