What to Say to Shut 'Em Up

When They Pitch Year-Round School

 

            We picked up a Mom's Night Off pizza last night, and the clerk said ruefully that her son, a second-grader, was already sick of school. It was Day Two in her small town outside Omaha. "I went one day," he told his mom. "I'm done."

            The look on her face . . . it was heart-breaking. Our youngster still has two weeks, but even then, it still doesn't feel right to be sending them off to school before Labor Day. Meanwhile, it appears that growing numbers of educrats are convincing parents that it's not only more convenient for them and their work schedules to have kids in school on a year-round basis, but it's somehow better for kids. Which is, of course, balderdash.

            It didn't stop year-round school from taking root in Kearney, and slowly spreading hither and yon. It could be that the end-game is to make sure the schools are open year-round to provide a reliable teenage workforce, since the School-to-Work vocational apprenticeships always come hand-in-hand with longer school calendars. But little kids and parents don't realize that. They just wonder whatever happened to the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.

            Good moms and dads know it's wrong to abdicate child-rearing to the State, and deny children the countless benefits of a summer unplugged from the daily grind at school. But the siren song of the greedy educrats, who want still more money and control, is very difficult to combat.

            Take heart, those who love kids and want them to have plenty of time to be kids. Here's a great article (by Bill Kauffman, American Enterprise Magazine, September 2002) you can use to fight back against the push for year-round school:

 

http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.17447/article_detail.asp

 

            Best excerpt:

 

            "Once the Soviet Union collapsed into its deserved junk heap, the summer school scolds discovered the Japanese, who incarcerated their children in school for 240 days a year.  The old bogeyboy of the regimented Russian, learning to design Sputniks while Johnny American wastes his summer catching frogs and playing baseball, gave way to the grim Asian youth mastering calculus before the onset of puberty...."

 

            "The two sides in this debate don't even speak the same language.  The year-round school advocates—credentialed "experts"—use the number-studded jargon of the bureaucrat, while the opponents speak in the language of family and love."

 

            And note this great quote at the end:

 

            "Bank Manager Richard C. Whipple in 1972: 'Let's give these children time to be kids and be with their parents; to lie on the summer grass and watch the clouds drifting by; to think out their small problems and have time of their own.  We push, push the younger generation and leave them no time.'"