I was wondering what the deal is with Academic years. Why do they start in September and finish in June/July and not in start January and end in December?
I remember in school we called our terms - Michaelmas, Lent and er…Summer, so it would appear that there is some sort of religious reason for it.
Does anyone know? And while I’m on the subject - what about Tax years?
I’m not too sure about school terms, but tax years (at least in the US) generally run from Jan 1 to Dec 31. The IRS allows any tax year a company wants but doesn’t like to see a company change it once set. For personal income tax, we get until April 15th to file so that we have time to assemble and analyze everything from the year before. The taxes are computed based on earnings during the calendar year.
I believe it dates back to the time when farming was much more of a family thing. Young, strong backs were needed during the summer for farming, and schools had to adjust their schedules or students could not attend.
September, huh? Must be nice. I have to go back to school on August 2, and graduate at the end of May. I have a 7-week summer this year. Our administration decided that 2 weeks off in October, at Christmas/New Year’s, and Spring Break is worth having no summer. The main reason is because when the school year was created way back when, in rural areas anyway, students still had to help with the harvest at home. The schools in more populated areas picked up the same schedule just to make things more uniform around the country. Now the trend is toward schedules more like the one I’m on now.
Road Rash, Bob T and brianjedi are all right - in the Middle Ages university students were allowed to return home at harvest time. There was then, in any case, several rival views as to when the year started. The ecclesiastical year started on the feast of the Annunciation, 25 March. In the UK the start of the tax year is still 5 April, which was 25 March Old Style when the calendar was last reformed in 1752.
Although the idea that schools were out in summer because of agricultural/harvest schedules makes sense, APB’s sugestion that medival university students went home in summer to help out on the farm does not make sense.
If you could afford to send your son to University, you did not need to worry about getting some extra help in summer. You could probably pay for all the hands you needed. And you probably hand someone to run the farm for you anyway.
Medival tuition cost a fortune. Only the wealthy could afford anything more than a basic education. Craftsmen and merchants fall into this category, farmers do not. (I’m oversimplifying, of course)
puk, I have to disagree. The idea that a university education was for gentlemen was a post-medieval development. Many students came from comparatively humble backgrounds and colleges were often endowed by donors with the education of the needy young scholar specifically in mind.
We’re talking medival as in 11th century right? I think the first universities were founded around that time in Northern-Italy. Before that time, monistaries where the only centers of learning in Europe.
I think that students from huble backgrounds being endowed was more the exeption than the rule. Look at the current situation. although grants exist, most students have to pay their tuition.
Education being for the gentry was a medival concept just as much as a post-medival one. Only in the last century or two has “education for the masses” gained popularity.
Peasants (serf) were not much more than property of the local noble. They were supposed to work the land period. The only education provided was some rudimentary “chuch-school”, meant to instill the serf with the fear of GOD, and keep him from disobeying the local noble. Anything more was considered to be a waste of the noble’s resources (i.e.the serf’s time)
I said nothing about peasants/serfs or about education for the masses. The son of a yeoman would have been a useful extra pair of hands at harvest time. As for the educational possibilities available in a medieval village, the assumption usually made is that the local priest, assuming that he was around and had some sort of education himself, would have tutored any promising young boy to meet the rather low entrance requirements in the expectation that he would go on to enter the Church. If no scholarship could be obtained, local patrons sometimes paid the fees hoping that the boy would later rise to a position from which he could repay them. Precise information on the membership of medieval universities during their early centuries is now impossible to recover, but the statistical studies which have been done for the late medieval period (14th cent. onwards) have usually confirmed these assumptions.
You’re right about local patrons paying fees in hopes of getting repaid. I wounder how often it happened though.
I think we agree that medieval universities contained a mix of students from noble families, rich merchant families and sponsored students. Unfortunately, we cannot attach percentages to these groups.
I do not believe that medieval universities contained a sufficient number of students from agricultural families to justify closing down for the summer.
Actually, I’m not even sure universities did close down for the summer. It’s not like there was such a thing as holidays other than the catholic holy days. Maybe they just stayed open?
Perhaps the practice of closing down for the summer started later on, i.e. when education became more widespread. maybe they chose the same period as schools for convenience.
I attend a US university on the Godforsaken trimester system-- 10 week terms. Out of several schools in this state’s system, only one is on the semester system and it is the most highly regarded school and we are all jealous of 14 week terms. The last school I went to, in another unnamed state directly north of my unnamed state, was also on this 10 week term (fall terms starts at the END of September). That university had decided to enter the 20th century at some point (a couple of years before I was there) and had printed out course catalogs and calendars for the semester system, students all registered, etc etc, and at the 11th hour the conservative legislators there decided to derail the entire project because, they held, students were need at home on the farm in August and September. Chaos ensued. And this was in the 1980s or 90s.
And just to establish beyond doubt that puk doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about…
J. I. Catto (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford: I. The early Oxford schools (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984), 173-4, 168-9.
J. I. Catto and Ralph Evans (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford: II. Late Medieval Oxford (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992), 511-16.
Damian Riehl Leader, A History of the University of Cambridge: I. The University to 1546 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988), 29-30, 39-41.