School in Ceuta, Spain opens the year with a Thriller dance routine

From Thriller costumes to Peace Day: how the school calendar gets hollowed out

How many days of actual teaching are left in a school year of 150 school days? The question was raised by a user after a video showed a school in Ceuta, Spain welcoming students at 8:30 in the morning with a dance routine set to Michael Jackson's "Thriller". The gesture has sparked a debate about how much classroom time is consumed by commemorations.

The list circulating is long and reads like the holiday inventory of a generous public administration: Halloween, All Saints' Day, School Day, Teachers' Day, Constitution Day, Christmas festival, Peace Day, Carnival, White Week, Women's Day, Book Day, Europe Day, Environment Day, Cultural Week, Science Week, Sports Day, Coexistence Day, field trips, study trips, orientation days, graduations and the last days of each term. And counting.

How many school days are lost to school celebrations

The calculation being discussed starts from a concrete base: 150 school days per year. On that total, each observance cuts into hours of subject matter. Not all of them cost a full day —many are activities within the timetable— but the drip is constant and hard to audit. Some argue the problem is not the celebration itself but the accumulation: a school can chain three celebrations in a single week with no one keeping track of the syllabus left behind.

Teachers' Day, for instance, is not just one day. In at least one case it is celebrated four times, according to the tally shared by one user. And in semi-private (publicly funded) schools, according to another participant, masses for the school's patron saint and religious gatherings are added to the common festivities, further swelling the list of de facto non-teaching days.

Halloween, the imported holiday that opens the consumer season

The Anglo-Saxon-origin celebration has established itself as the starting gun of the shopping season. Some describe it as an imported pagan festival that kicks off the race to Christmas, shops and costumes included. In the classroom, the costume competes with the curriculum and the debate shifts from content to staging.

The scene at the Ceuta school —a dance routine at the gate first thing in the morning— sums up the paradox: considerable effort, coordination and creativity devoted to an activity that appears in no official syllabus. No one questions the teachers' dedication. What is questioned is where those hours go.

The underlying problem: no one audits the real calendar

Beyond the easy joke about the "do-nothing day", the issue has an economic and management edge: every school holiday mobilises resources, displaces content and complicates work-life balance for families who do not have that day covered. And there is no public, uniform record of how many of these activities take place per school and year.

The growing feeling is that the calendar has filled up with noise. With 150 days of class and a list of observances that keeps growing, the question is not whether some celebrations are superfluous, but who decides which ones are. And so far, no dance routine can clear that up.