If Only American Kids Could Eat School Lunches Like They Do in France

[mwooldri]

35. Same here with my son. I had the benefit of an English State School education.

I had a 15 minute break and a hour to hour-thirty for lunch, depending on whether I was in first, middle or comprehensive school. Since school in England typically ends in the academic year of your sixteenth birthday, most people go on to a pre-university college or a technical college. At the college I went to, an hour was still scheduled for lunch and was used for club activities.

My eldest is now in middle school. The school he goes to is not a traditional one (a magnet school modeled after the Ron Clark Academy) and there is a fair bit of "play" in class, so I don't hear any complaints from him about the lack of recess. The lack of recess in elementary school was surprising to me too - apparently the school system thinks that PE substitutes for recess, so the school only had recess three times a week.