There is an understandable appeal to the idea of a five-day school week in Kashmir. 

At a time when children carry heavier academic expectations, move routinely between school and private tuition, and grow up in households increasingly anxious about marks, admissions and careers, giving them two uninterrupted days away from school can sound less like indulgence than common sense. 

The argument becomes even more persuasive when one looks abroad: children in many prosperous societies attend school from Monday to Friday, but those countries are hardly accused of taking education lightly. 

It is therefore tempting to frame the debate as a choice between an old six-day routine and a more humane, modern understanding of childhood.

The difficulty is that Kashmir does not enter this debate with an ordinary school calendar or a common educational memory. 

Here, the year available to a child has always been narrower than the calendar on the wall suggests. 

Winter consumes a substantial part of it, and weather can take more, while summer closures, once hardly central to the valley’s educational planning, are becoming increasingly common. Public holidays remain fixed and the possibility of an unforeseen interruption has never entirely disappeared. 

None of these realities provides an argument for keeping children in school merely for the sake of attendance. They do, however, make one question unavoidable before another regular day is removed from the timetable: how much uninterrupted instruction does a Kashmiri child actually receive in a year, and what happens to that total when Saturday disappears?

That is a more useful place to begin than with the number five or six, because neither number has any educational virtue of its own. 

OECD countries, for example, average about 186 instructional days a year at the primary level and 184 at lower secondary, while providing roughly 804 and 922 hours of compulsory annual instruction respectively. 

The figures vary widely between systems, which is precisely the point: successful countries do not become successful because their children are home on Saturday. They rather decide what children should learn, how many hours are necessary to make that possible, how vacations should be distributed, how teachers should use classroom time, and only then does the shape of the week emerge.

To take the weekend from such a system while ignoring the structure supporting it is merely comparison by appearance.

Kashmir has another reason to resist such shortcuts, and it lies less in statistics than in memory. 

For a generation that went to school through the 1990s, the 2000s and the years of repeated political turmoil that followed, education was often defined as much by interruption as by instruction. 

There were mornings when the school existed, the teacher was appointed, the books were ready and the uniform had been laid out the night before, but circumstances outside the school gate determined whether any of that mattered. 

Shutdown calls, curfews, protests, restrictions and periods of unrest repeatedly fractured academic routines. Floods later did their damage, and the pandemic eventually produced an........

© Kashmir Observer