Goodbye, Recess and Summer Vacation

Earlier this year, I made a list of 39 things that will probably disappear in our lifetime.  Now it is a list of 40 things, because I added time out from school.  You can read the whole list here, if you haven’t already.  Or continue on to read the new entry (don’t mind the paragraph numbers).

1. Time Out From School. In the past, schools gave students several opportunities to blow off stream. One was recess at some point during the school day; another was a summer vacation that lasted from early June until Labor Day–a full three months. Unfortunately, at the same time we fell behind other countries, academically. Far Eastern countries like South Korea routinely get the highest test scores in math and science, while the United States ranks alongside modernized but minor nations like Lithuania. In the name of correcting that, and meeting the standards of the "No Child Left Behind" law, American schools are cutting recess short, or cutting it out completely, so they can cram more facts into the kids and they will score better on those standardized tests.
2. On the other hand, childhood obesity is also a serious problem, so the kids are going to need some physical activity every day. Well, there’s one recess activity I had as a kid that future kids won’t have — dodge ball. Dodge ball has few rules and requires only one piece of equipment (a large ball), so any school can play it, but most are getting rid of it, because they see it as a mean-spirited, violence-promoting game. Oh, really? Back in the day, I hated getting hit by a dodge ball, but I also got over it by the time I was in my next class.
3. As for summer vacation, today I am a winter person, but when I was a kid, summer was my favorite time of the year, for one reason–I didn’t have to go to school. I was thirteen years old when Alice Cooper’s hit "School’s Out" was released, and I could really relate to that. For the next three months I was free, unless my parents sent me to camp, a special summer class on subjects like art, or they decided to go someplace. Here, as with recess, school districts are shortening the time out (these days, the typical school year starts in early to mid-August, not September), in the name of more instruction time.
4. When we ask why school summers are getting shorter, the answer we get is that summer vacation is an archaic leftover, from the days when most Americans were farmers. According to this, the typical family needed extra hands to work the farm in the summer months, so the kids stayed home to help, and the schools cooperated by planning their schedules around the farming cycle. This isn’t really true. The times when little farm hands were needed the most were for spring planting and fall harvest. In the Northern states, summer was the second slowest time of the year; only farm animals were likely to need much attention. In the Deep South, summer was the slowest time of the year, when about the only thing the farmers had to pick was okra; you didn’t need extra hands for that.
5. Summer vacation was meant to make life easier for city folks. By the mid-1800s, the US had several big cities, starting with Boston, Philadelphia and New York, but they weren’t nice places to live. Contrary to what you hear from today’s environmentalists, in urban areas, pollution was worse in the nineteenth century than it has been since. Before the introduction of the internal combustion engine, cities were choked by coal smoke, industrial waste, poor sanitation, and most of all, horse manure. Most of the people living in cities did so because their jobs were there, and before there were automobiles, suburbs and zoning laws, it made sense to have your home as close to the workplace as possible. Urban smells and filth were at their worst in the summer months, so any working man who could afford it got his wife and kids out, usually by sending them to a beach or into the mountains, and if possible, he would go with them.
6. Anyway, there are two real reasons why school boards would like to make summer vacations a thing of the past. First, they have noticed that the countries where students are doing great don’t have long vacations for them. Second, there is the problem of kids forgetting most of what they learned during the previous school year, while busy with anything that doesn’t require much brainwork, so the first few weeks of a school year involve re-teaching what the kids should have remembered. Some districts are trying semesters in which kids are in school for nine weeks, and then out for three, the idea being that they won’t forget as much if they take several short vacations, in place of a big one. Others are simply making the school year longer, at summer’s expense. By 2012, 10 percent of all American students are expected to have some kind of year-round schooling, and as time goes by, that number is only expected to increase.