Summer Vacation Out of Step With Our Time

My grandfather had firm opinions on a lot of things, including that watermelons were no good until after the Fourth of July. I think he would have changed his mind now that the comely fruit comes virtually seedless and can be found sweet and firm any month of the year. But, I still feel a little traitorous even contemplating a bite before I see red, white, and blue bunting hung from storefronts.It's the same way when I think about kids going to school year-round. I'm not so far (in my mind, anyway) from childhood that I have forgotten the joy of a seemingly endless summer ahead of me, and the freedom that felt like. And I see how my children are thriving under the relative freedom of day camp. Unlike reading and math, they get to choose between archery and arts and crafts.

But summer vacation, it turns out, is not set in the stone of the ancients. It's a mid-19th century invention, put in place by people concerned about the mental weariness of teachers and students and who understood that epidemics festered in all that heat.

In the early 21st century, our reality is vastly different. The epidemic we're experiencing as a nation is one of underachievement. As Nicholas Kristoff recently wrote in The New York Times, "American children drop in I.Q. each summer vacation -- because they aren't in school or exercising their brains."

He goes on to say: "This is less true of middle-class students whose parents drag them off to summer classes or make them read books. But poor kids fall two months behind in reading level each summer break, and that accounts for much of the difference in learning trajectory between rich and poor students."

I suppose my 6-year-old son is lucky -- though from the amount of blowback we get, he doesn't know it -- that alongside watching the Red Sox on TV, he's required to read books like Satch & Me. It's not a classic, but it does the job of making him think.

I don't know if I'm ready for him to be back in school, as 40,000 students in Wake County, N.C., (which encompasses Raleigh) are after a brief holiday -- the start of their new year-round schooling program. But I'm beginning to think that maybe it's a radical idea I should start getting my head around -- like eating watermelon in June.