All Our Kids Belong To Them
One of my favorite childhood memories about summer vacation was being totally, 100% in control of my day… unless, of course, my mother had plans for me which, luckily, she seldom did.
Oh, sure, there were days when I was bored beyond belief: neighboring kids were on vacations, it was too hot to play outside, and the 3 channels on television were all playing game shows and soap operas I wasn’t interested in seeing. So I read. One summer I worked my way through the Nancy Drew series which, considering I was only in third grade meant that I was stretching my reading skills. The next school year it showed, too.
Ok, so my mother wasn’t thrilled a few summers later when I found her brand-new copy of Joy of Sex and began asking questions. It disappeared, replaced by a stack of National Geographic magazines which were almost as educational, at least to my sexually curious 12-year-old mind.
Another summer, after my brother set aside the book he’d been reading in favor of chasing girls, I picked up Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern and encountered my first taste of fantasy fiction. It was the beginning of what’s proven to be a lifelong love of reading and a deeply rooted certainty that as long as I have a good book to read I’ll never truly be bored.
Those summers, when I wasn’t reading to fill time, I was writing or learning other things that piqued my curiosity. I churned out (what I believed to be) fascinating short stories and poems, wrote letters to my grandparents and aunties, even dashed off a letter to President Carter complaining about the smog-producing factories on the hillsides near our home. (He personally wrote back, incidentally, which didn’t surprise me at the time but now seems amazing he’d found time for a kid considering all that Cold War stuff going on.) I taught myself how to type on our manual typewriter, began experimenting in the kitchen and finally learned how to cook without almost starting a fire, and, yes, I watched TV… when I wasn’t busy exploring other things… and that was seldom.
Kids these days don’t have those three long summer months to fill anymore. It’s not just the over-abundance of cable programming that’s at fault: the schools themselves are destroying opportunities for kids to develop their own interests. As Lynne explains about her child’s summer vacation:
M is apparently expected to do 75 pages of that math book we received yesterday, read a book, and write a paragraph on each chapter during his “vacation“. Everything is due on the first day of school, and if it’s not, he’ll fail his first report card.
I totally sympathize. Although I homeschool my youngest (who has no idea that other children get 3 months off school each year), my teenager’s still in public school. She started her summer with homework assignments to complete and sports-related training to attend over “the break.” I was fit to be tied.
Even calling it “the break” ticks me off. It implies that the school is doing her a favor by not mandating her attendance but meanwhile still retains authority and control over my daughter while she’s not attending. And, guess what: according to the court system, that’s not merely implied: it’s a legal fact.
All our kids belong to them.
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I hear you on this but you must admit that the average joe blow parent does know OR care who it is that is on the School Board. No one votes in these elections, so no wonder we get boneheads writing the rules.
I meant to say does not know or care!
True, but that’s probably because few people in their right mind would think a School Board has the power to decide it has the power over vacations when kids aren’t enrolled in or attending schools.
Which doesn’t make sense, IMVO. Kids have to enroll each year to attend school, even if they attended the previous year, so doesn’t that essentially imply that the conclusion of the school year also concludes the school’s authority over the child?
One would think. Logic and the schools, though, seem to get along even worse than logic and the other bits and pieces of government that infest our homes.
I’m becoming more and more convinced that giving someone a little bit of authority is something like saying someone is a little bit pregnant: nonsense. Folks tend to see themselves as in charge or not, and lose appreciation for any shades of gray one might try to build into the thing when they put it into practice.
Which is a very long way of saying that seeing this sort of thing makes me so angry that I lack a good metaphor for just how much it pisses me off. Not that I have an opinion or anything. Heh.
Yep, I’ve bene ranting to my family about this all day… in between planning the curriculum for when homeschool starts back up late next month.
Homework was originally intended to get parents involved. Keep them up to date as to what their child/ren were doing in school. Now it’s a way to finish the lesson that was started in the classroom so the teacher can start something new the following day.
Annoys the hell out of me.
You are so right about the decay of summer vacation. When I was knee high to a grass hopper, I would be out of school for a solid 12 weeks and no one expected us to be able to do much beyond avoid drooling on ourselves upon our return.
My youngest has but 6 weeks and my elders have only 9. Between quickie vacations to visit grandparents days of driving in different directions, scout and church camp, and that pesky work that keeps sucking up my time, my boys have little chance to discover that school is better than boredom.
There is something not quite right about today’s schooling.
I fear that “something” is the school system — and government’s — belief that parents are essentially inept and only the degree-certified “experts” stand between us and the ruination of our children.
Bass-ackwards, if you ask me.
Or could it be that in a two income household the “short break” suits the parents?