Saving Summer

What have we profited if we gain the world but lose our souls?

- Mark 8:36

The deep center of July used to be the half-way point of summer vacation. Stretching out in front of that marker lay as many lazy, unstructured days as there were drifting behind it in steamy wisps of memory. Sadly this is no longer true. Educators and law-makers have determined that children need to be in school all the time. It’s called 45/15 – or year-round school. The number of days required by Federal law that children must be in school remains at 180 so the issue of how to spread these days out over the year is the root of the year-round-school controversy. Every year a small contingency of die-hard parents speaks out against those who propose 45/15 and just narrowly succeed in pushing it back. Then, every year, those in charge of such things rearrange the calendar to pump in more days off during the academic year, thus stealing from the length of summer vacation anyway. So far, this diabolical plan is working. Summer holiday now begins earlier in May but ends even as July does.

I swear I don’t know what they could be thinking but then I have a slightly different definition for education and what makes up a good solid scholastic foundation. Many school districts, now under the gun to prove how good they are, and thus maintain their jobs and Federal funding, grasp desperately at solutions to streamlining the process of filling up kids with information. It is a general concensus that the answer lies in making the time allowed to do it more contiguous. Certainly, kids lose less information if there is less time between lessons. Twelve to thirteen weeks of summer vacation means that teachers often must spend the first six weeks immersed in review of the previous school year. Okay, so what? Anyone over age twenty-five did exactly this their entire school careers, which includes even those esteemed credentialed educators who have now decided children cannot be properly prepared if they squander three months not hitting the books. Pardon me for asking but did summers off thwart these folks from getting to where they are?

At the heart of my somewhat skewed perspective, information and more of the same piled higher and deeper doesn’t constitute education anyway. Learning how to learn and learning to love learning is what we really should be going for, isn’t it? If you look at it from the practical side, all that data in/data out is mostly just practising the skills of learning.The marginally hidden crux of it all isn’t so-much-data-so-little-time, it’s about appearances and numbers. Unfortunately, the numbers are stacked against all school districts now because the quest to truly educate has been derailed by the mandate to prove that we are educating.

If we sincerely wanted to expose the root of the problem of declining grade averages and waning interest in learning, perhaps we should look instead to lazy parenting, abysmal role models from the entertainment/sports industry and superficial values hammered into our children from movies/television, advertising and the print media. Not even year-round school can begin to overcome these destructive influences. Let us remember that 180 days is still just 180 days. School is not the only place where children can be filled up with information.

Getting down to it, what is it that we are really expecting of our children?

I know I am spitting in the wind. I realize my grandchildren will not have the same life experiences that I had or even that of their parents; that’s the way it is. Change is the only constant. I’m certainly not one of those fogies who believes that only the “old” ways are the best. But when the merciless summer sun is retiring late in the hour, cueing the fireflies to begin their fairy dance, I hear the rising call of the cicada and remember when life seemed considerably easier to digest. There was time for everything, even nothing. Perhaps this is just another illusion of mine but one thing is true, historically the most enduring cultures that have survived all earth changes continue to understand and honor the basic human need to rest and have downtime.

Kids can’t miss what they’ve never had, it’s true, but it is also true that human psyche is the same now and forever and that is something no amount of education can alter.

If I could, I’d save summer because long vacations are therapeutic if for no other reason they make you desperate to get back into routine. If it were in my power, I'd proclaim that summer vacations would always last long enough for kids to be so bored out of their gourds they'd be more than ready for another nine months of school; so excited for school to start again that they can’t sleep the night before. It always worked for me.

Sometimes it's the littlest things that are the most profound.