Students in Grades K-12 should NOT receive any work during the holidays

For this round, I will counter-act what Pro has said in Round 2 by breaking down each bullet point he gave and highlighting the main selling point of the particular bullet point. 1."However, most of the work given to students during the break is not usually mentally stimulating. The type of work given to students during holidays is almost always busywork (I know this from personal experience). This particular argument is very hard to prove and debate because every school is different. When I went to school, if there was a holiday or break coming up, teachers were lenient and knew that we would like to spend time with our families. They did still give us homework, but very light. I think its good that teachers don't give students a free pass when there is a break from school. It cements the fact that they are still in school with there being an exception during Summer when school is out. 2. "Also, how do we address the issue of students who go on vacations during holidays and have no time to do their homework? Do we penalize them for taking some well-needed time off?" This depends. Usually when someone goes on vacation they stay in a hotel and if the homework given is a book or assignment from a textbook, the student should do the homework in the hotel after a day of doing activities. Vacations are often traveled to by an airplane or car. This is actually the best time for the students to complete the homework because they are often bored of the long wait to get to the destination. But, I am not sure what type of homework you were talking about. If it's something a bit bigger like a paper, extensions can be given. In my opinion, we shouldn't penalize the students for taking the well needed time off. In the school I went to teachers/staff understood that we did need time off. If the vacation was told to the teacher ahead of time (lets say 1 week before leaving for vacation) teachers would assign any projects as soon as possible so the student could have time when they're not on vacation to finish it. 3. If a student has, say, 100 math problems to do, there is a good chance that they will leave them until the end of the break. By that time, at least a month and a half will have passed and they will have forgotten most of the things they learned during the year; the same concepts needed to their math work." Teachers can't necessarily force the students to get the homework done right away over the break but they can definitely enforce it as much as possible. I'm assuming that you are stating that they receive the 100 math problems over Summer break because of the month and a half time period that will pass. Many kids actually don't do anything besides sports at the beginning of Summer. Not even that many kids like to take sports because it "wastes" their summer. But what do they actually do during summer? Play video games, go on dates, dirt biking, etc.. Lets face it, that's a very typical summer for the average kid of the age group you stated. If that's all they want to do, then they have plenty of useful time to finish the 100 math problems right away and just get it over with. If they don't get it done over a seasoned time period, that's their fault. 4. "Most students would find these books boring and would neglect to read them. Then would they be penalized for not reading them which is not a good way to start off the school year. Even the most die hard bookworms would find some of these books boring. Besides, why would any (pre)teen want to read Charles Dickens when they could borrow a copy of their favourite trendy novel at the public library, and that too without any restrictions?" This is the weakest point of your Round 2 debate in my opinion. If we surveyed 100 kids and asked them why or why not they think school is fun, I would put a lot of money in saying that at least 85 would say they don't think it is fun. The 15 that do would probably say because they get to spend time with their friends 6 hours a day. No one ever said that school had to be fun. If it was all about fun then less would be completed and more time would be wasted. Kids on break don't like to read, especially old fashioned authors like Charles Dickens. They'd much rather read a teen crisis book or something which is fine. But it goes with the curriculum. Many excellent additions to literature are not fun for teens to read, but that's the point. It's about discipline and branching out. A Charles Dickens book wouldn't hurt at all to read over the break. I'd like to conclude Round 2 by saying this: I believe my opponent Pro is thinking strongly about what the average kid would like to do 100% of the time opposed to what they should do. Fun is great and kids need it, but at the same time it must be balanced well.