As kids across the world get out of school, debate has risen over whether America can still afford to send thousands of people on break for two and a half months every year. After all, the US only ranks 25th in math scores worldwide, even as it spends massive amounts of money on the education system (only Luxembourg spends more.)

So it does seem reasonable to wonder if we should really be out of school all summer, a practice that’s leftover from agricultural times when kids had to be home to harvest the crops.

However, as a (biased) high-school student, I strongly believe that we need summer. All my life, I’ve been told to be creative, adventurous and imaginative. But it’s impossible to truly be any of these things within the confines of a sterilized classroom. Summer is when we can finally learn things outside of school that will really serve us well in life – speaking new languages on travels to foreign countries, learning skills in camps that interest us, being outdoors and getting exercise outside of a gym or soccer field, not to mention the pre-college programs, boarding schools and online courses that thousands of people participate in every summer.

There is also the tricky matter of how to rearrange the school year. Would it be broken up into trimesters, with three month-long breaks? Would other holidays be extended to make up for the loss of summer vacation, or would there be more three-day weekends? Although there are a few plausible ways to replace summer break, when schools in the past have tried different schedules they found that it simply did not work.

But apart from the logistical and educational setbacks rearranging summer would cause, there is one real reason that it can never be taken away. It’s in our heritage, a tradition now so deeply rooted in American (and world) culture that its loss would mean the loss of something much more than just a few extra weeks of school.

Summer means swimming, barbecues, the Fourth of July, travel, family, fireworks, sun and happiness. And in the end, Ihope we’ll find that these things really are more important than school.

Fina Short, 14, is a sophomore at Eastside Preparatory School. She lives in Medina.