Fish are jumpin', and the cotton is high

Sign in Ljubljana Airport re: illegal items to transport

It's summertime, right? So the living should be easy.

Kenneth Gold on
summer school

In the U.S. we have gotten used to long summer breaks for children and even for teachers. Every year there are news stories linking the history of our school calendar to the needs of farm families, but last year PBS -- drawing on a 2002 book by historian Kenneth Gold --  argued that this is not true. In fact, taking the summer off is more about the urban middle and wealthy classes, who regularly fled the hot cities in summer for cooler climes -- the mountains, the lakeside, the beach. And at some point they began to ship their children off to summer sleep away camp.

There are still schools today which lack air conditioning, and students swelter in those places in June and September. The nine-month school year is entrenched across much of the country, leaving classrooms empty and children unsupervised during the long summer months.

My cousin Kate recently asked me whether as parents we had given in to what she sees as the pressure to sign kids up for camps. She and I can think back on long, lazy summer days in our childhood -- hours spent reading books, doing cooking and building projects, taking bike rides, and spending hours and hours playing underwater games at the pool or perfecting our cannonball off the one-meter diving board. I remember my several weeks at camp -- three times, I think, I got to go to sleep away camp, to a swimming camp which featured crafts, boating and archery along with the three hours a day of swim practice, and once to a Girl Scout canoeing camp where we cooked over bonfires and went on hikes in addition to learning how to paddle and portage. (The week ended in a disastrous day-long canoe trip interrupted by colossal thunderstorms, but that's another story.)

Given that I grew up as a protestant in suburbia, I also went to "vacation bible school" a few times (a day camp environment where we learned songs about Noah's ark, or at least that's all I can recall) and to a church camp in Michigan for a week as a teenager. One summer I took summer school -- math, as I recall, in about fourth grade.

And we wasted a lot of time. I remember making endless towering chef's salads for lunch and watching soap opera after soap opera. I can't remember driving my mother crazy, but I'm sure that I did.

My answer to cousin Kate was yes -- though we are academics and in theory get the summer "off," that is alas a myth, since we continue to write and read and plan new courses (and even advise students, grade exams, read theses, review books and book manuscripts and tenure files, etc. etc.), even when classes aren't in session. So we have historically enrolled our children in summer camps, from circus camp to acting camp to outdoor day camp. The most successful of our camps was the University of Pennsylvania Museum Anthropologists in the Making Camp, where both of our kids spent many happy sessions and in recent years have gone back as volunteers to help out.

Which brings me to my opening image. I have a lot of friends who insist that children need "unstructured time" in the summer, that they need down time, they need space to be creative, and so on. I even have friends who believe that children need to be bored. And I am totally on board with all of that.

One of Erica Kane's many wedding images
from early 1980s era All My Children 

But as parents who often work at home, we cannot stand to see children wasting time, nor to listen to them grumble about being bored. And now in the era of teenagers and many devices, the complaint of "I spent all day staring at a screen" doesn't elicit a lot of sympathy from me. I'm all over summer being enjoyable -- but is staring at a screen (whether All My Children and One Day at a Time or iPod instagram shots and youtube videos) really that much fun? As a teenager I may have watched Princess Diana's wedding to Charles, arguably a historic event, but how many times did I watch as Erica Kane wed, bedded, and fled her various husbands? And just what was I learning?

Days kids spend in school across the world
Credit Norbert Haupt

The alternative of structured summer camp has worked for us. Ignorance may not always get you into trouble, but intellectual and cultural engagement -- and more importantly semi-mediated engagement with children of your own age as well as younger and older than you -- is a fine way of spending the summer. It's not cheap -- though up to a certain age it is tax-deductible as a "childcare" option to enable parents to work -- and as such it further emphasizes the income inequality in our society. But since I believe that it is totally worth it, I wish policy makers would find a way to facilitate summer camp for all children.

Or keep them in school. Kids are currently in class about 180 days in most states. I don't know how parents who work conventional jobs manage.

Overnight sleepover camp -- the kind with horseback riding and ceramics classes, the kind where kids go back year after year for much of the summer -- has been mostly out of reach financially for us. But we've managed, I think, to give the children a real summer childhood, even if part of it was spent in a museum with mummies and other ancient objects. If nothing else, they will retain more of what they learned than I did -- and what they've learned has been far more interesting.

Ignorance is not really bliss. Seems to me that bliss is summer camp.