It's the End of Summer As I Know It (and I Feel Fine)

By Josh Corman

Clever Alice Cooper Reference

Arne Duncan and President Obama plotting the destruction of summer.
Hilarious.

When I was a kid, I heard the old expression, credited to Ben Franklin, that you can count on just two things in this world: death and taxes. With all due respect to our most quotable founding father, I  disagreed from the moment I heard the quip. For most school-age children in this country, the concepts of both death and taxes are mere abstractions, their inevitability a distant, vague proposition. So if eight-year-old me had been allowed to amend Franklin's aphorism, I would have added to it something that I really did feel would happen every year like clockwork, something I felt was my God-given right as an American, something I would fight for, if it came to that. Death? Sure. Taxes? Fine. But the thing I could always count on? Summer vacation.

From early June through mid-August for every year of my public education, I was free. I played in the yard, watched or played baseball six hours a day (and organized, reorganized, and shelved baseball cards for another two—great practice for bookshelves or record collections), ate lunch whenever I wanted, went swimming, jumped on the trampoline, skipped stones (seriously), learned the game of golf, and read every book I could get my hands on, among about a hundred other things. It was wonderful, even when it was boring. Summer vacation was how I learned to be by myself, to find entertainment off the beaten path, to terrorize my little sister in inventive new ways. Without it, I'm sure I wouldn't be the person I am today (nor would my sister, for that matter, but her nightmares are down to two nights a week, tops).

Increasingly, though, the rumblings from those highest of higher-ups in education spell doom for the traditional summer vacation. Death and Taxes indeed.

Time on Our Hands


The first question to ask about the end of summer vacation is why? Why put an end to this most beloved of childhood rituals?

The answers from those dark, nefarious forces aiming to squelch everyone's good time are surprisingly persuasive. On the one hand, the discussion over America's global competition in the academic realm has taken center stage. Both President Obama and Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, have taken pains to point out the need for more globally competitive students as they outline proposals and policies. Chief among the president's suggestions has been lengthening the amount of time students spend in school, either by extending the school day or the school year. My knee-jerk reaction as a teacher (it would have been the same when I was a student) is to boo loudly and frequently, but if I'm honest, I know that my vitriol is primarily the result of selfishness. I like being done with work before 4:00 PM, and I love having summers off.

But if I look at the issue more objectively, that is, if I try to see the issue simply in terms of problems and solutions, it seems, initially at least, difficult to argue with a longer school day and a longer school year. Consider, as Malcolm Gladwell points out in his fantastic book Outliers, that students in many Asian and European countries spend about 250 days a year in school, compared to the average American student's 180-190. Kids in the U.S., especially those with long summer breaks, are shown routinely to retain fewer of the skills and less knowledge than those who have a shortened summer vacation. This is even more true for kids in lower socio-economic strata, because it's likely that they're not being read to or taken to museums or enrolled in summer camp programs that might help bridge some of the wide gap between school years.

Isn't it obvious that kids who spend 25% more time learning to master skills will be better at those skills (and potentially given more time in which to master them, meaning fewer rushed lessons and fewer kids being turned off math because they took longer to understand its underlying principles)? Isn't it clear that taking immense amounts of time without any sort of targeted instruction throws an enormous wrench into kids' ability to learn?

Of course it is. But you and I both know that it isn't the whole story, either.

What We Do With the Time That Is Given to Us


I graduated high school with somebody who went to MIT. One of my best friends is at NYU law school. Another friend has studied at Oxford. All of these people had lengthy summer vacations. They all engaged their minds in a variety of ways, looked for education in a broader sense, everywhere they could. The latter two goofed around a lot and spent a lot of time doing things that no sane person would consider intellectually beneficial. And yet, there they are, smart, decent human beings with a lot to offer the world.

I'm less concerned with asking the question, "But what would they have been able to accomplish with all that extra learning time?" than asking, "What would they have missed out on if they'd been cooped up in a classroom sixty-five extra days a year?" The reason the second question interests me more is that I think I know the answer to the first one, but I'm much less certain about the second. I would hope that they would have still developed some of the same extra-curricular interests and met the same friends and been able to use their time free from school to experience some of the incredibly formative moments of their youths, but I don't know if that's accurate.

Thinking about this makes me realize how delicate a balance the relationship is between structured learning time and those moments which are, at least on their surface, totally removed from intellectual or academic concerns. I would distrust anyone who said we didn't need both, but I have no idea what the exact balance between the two should look like.

Perhaps we can take a clue from Sir Ken Robinson, whose TED talks are among the most viewed in the website's history (his first one, titled "Schools Kill Creativity," is actually #1). Robinson points out that schools very often do a piss-poor job of adapting to the needs of students whose strengths lie outside of the traditional spectrum of academic subjects (math, science, languages, etc.). He claims that an alien looking down on Western education could only conclude that its purpose is to produce university professors. Think about the kids you went to school with. Who finished at the top of the class? What was most valued in those students by their teachers? Maybe you're like Emily, who in her post on creativity last week admitted that she had submerged her more creative instincts in the interest of more measurable academic skills. (She was class salutatorian, by the way.) How many kids are like her? How many aren't capable of succeeding in school like she did because their intelligence isn't as varied or adaptable as hers? How many feel like they aren't good at anything only because what they were good at wasn't valued by their schools? Robinson says it's this last thought that bothers him most.

And it should. Because when it comes to education reform, we assume that students should essentially be treated the same, that there's one way to define intelligence and that, therefore, the most practical answer to the question, "How do we make our schools better and our students stronger?" is to make the school day longer and shorten summer vacation, rather than question the value of what we're teaching them to be.

Maybe we will have to spend more time in school. But first, we should ask ourselves what the value of time outside of school is and see if we can't learn a little something from summer vacation that would apply nicely inside a classroom. What if we used those extra sixty-five days to let kids explore their passions and interests outside of the core content subjects? What if we acknowledged that just because kids are out of school, that doesn't mean that they aren't learning constantly, turning themselves into the types of people we want to succeed in our culture—not just because they're smart or they did well in school, but because they're assured of who they are, confident in what they do, and capable of a more rounded view of the world.

If we fill our schools with students like that, they will leave school and build a richer society once they're out in the world. I'd take that outcome, even if we still finish behind France in the TIMMS test, 'cause I bet we'd beat their asses in Calvinball.