Schools and Summer Break

Summer vacation has been an integral part of American family life for more than a hundred years. That is primarily due to one thing: school’s out. 

In my New Jersey childhood, school ended around mid-June, but varied based on how many "snow days" had closed school and extended the year to the required 180 days. I knew that in other parts of the country, school opened in August (not September) and closed in May (not June).

But why is there no school in summer? Most people assume it’s a holdover from a time when the country was more agrarian, and children were required to help out on the family farm. I heard that as a kid. That is a factor, but the summer break or vacation we know today actually had more to do with urban health concerns and public policy than farming. 

This may sound backwards to you, but rural schools in the 1800s did build calendars around farming, but they did it by holding school in winter and summer and taking off spring and fall which are the busiest farm months. 

I didn't learn this until I took a graduate education course. Historian Kenneth Gold explains it in School’s In: The History of Summer Education in American Public Schools that summer was actually the slowest agricultural season compared to planting and harvest. So if the calendar was designed purely for farm labor, summer would be the worst time to take off.

So why did we ditch spring/fall breaks for summer break?

City schools in the 1800s were overcrowded brick ovens with no AC and bad ventilation. Summer heat combined with large classes (often 50 kids) in one room led to disease outbreaks. Cholera, typhoid, and other illnesses spiked in summer. Health officials literally recommended shutting schools down in July and August.

Most major renovations could only happen with kids out of the way. Summer became the maintenance window by default.

Wealthy urban families fled cities every summer to escape the heat. That left schools half-empty and split along class lines. Reformers like Horace Mann wanted standardized, equal schools for everyone. A common summer break fixed the “rich kids gone, poor kids sweltering” problem.

There was also a weird medical theory amongst 19th-century doctors that genuinely believed too much studying in summer heat caused “brain fever” or mental exhaustion in children. Summer rest was prescribed like medicine.

Horace Mann and the Common School Movement thought rural schedules were too short and inconsistent. Many farm-area schools only ran 60-80 days per year. Reformers wanted longer, standardized school years — closer to 180 days — and they modeled it after urban systems and Prussia’s age-graded schools.

To make age-graded classrooms work across districts, you needed everyone on the same calendar. The farm-driven spring/fall breaks had to go.

Between 1880-1920, states started tying school funding to minimum instructional days. The 180-day calendar won out, running from late summer to late spring. By then, most Americans lived in cities or towns, not on farms. The calendar standardized around urban needs, not agricultural ones.

Happy New Year. It's September Again.

 

The back to school ads have been running for weeks on the Net and TV and store aisles are already picked over for things to buy.

I used to have have a rather nostalgic view of this time of late summer. My memories of it as a kid were actually pretty good. Yeah, I was sad about summer ending and thought about all the things I didn't do and now I couldn't do - but I also liked buying school supplies.

I thought this was going to be the first September since I was 4 years old that I wasn't going back to school as a student or teacher.  My internal clock and calendar hasn't really ever had a chance to consider January as the start of the year, because September has always been the start of the year.

But, it turns out I will be teaching a class after all.

Of course, school supplies in my childhood days meant a new blue 3-ring notebook, a filler pack of paper, and some pens.

When I was in elementary and high school, no one carried a backpack. You carried books.
I guess we were in better shape because now carrying your books seems to be a real issue in schools.

Back to school clothing was always a shopping trip. I imagine that girls spend more time and money on clothes and on picking out a first day of school outfit than guys did.

Of course, my first back to school shopping trips were with my mom.  It seemed to me to be such a chore, but you wanted to make a good impression - on the teacher.

As I got older, I guess I must have given it some thought, but I can't recall doing much thinking about back to school clothing in high school. It was a time when jeans and a t-shirt were the uniform. How much could you do with that?

Shopping was basically just replacing worn out pants and shirts with ones that were newer but pretty much the same.

Nowadays (based on ads I see for male and female outfits) it seems that a lot of the clothing is pretty unisex and interchangeable.

A lot of parents of college students now give kids an Amazon.com Student Prime Account so they can do their own shopping.

I actually go back far enough that I recall when girls never wore pants to school. All skirts and dresses.  I missed that later. I don't have daughters and don't spend much time in schools other than colleges, so I'm out of touch. Do girls ever wear dresses to school anymore? I see them in the ads too, but they look a little out of place.

When I was an undergrad at Rutgers, the standard outfit for guys was still jeans and a t-shirt. That doesn't seem to have changed much. I don't think that school shirts, caps and sweatshirts were as popular as they are today. They were seen as a bit too rah-rah and "establishment."

In my dorm, the wiring was so bad that we weren't allowed to have one of those little refrigerators (though we did). Microwaves were non-existent. No cable and few TV sets except in the lounges. No computers except in a few labs.

Now, those are all items to bring to college. I see in the college-oriented back-to-school ads flat screen TVs, coffeemakers, lots of laptops and real decorating items for beds and walls.

I took the blankets and sheets off my bed at home and brought them to my dorm. Yes, they were the wrong size, but so what? I took my posters from home and moved them to the dorm walls.


I did bring my stereo and records. Big speakers were big items. Now you see them on garbage pickup days on the curb. People just use their phone or a laptop and listen through little transistor-radio sized speakers or have some plug in speaker device.

A sign of spring on campus was people putting their speakers near their dorm window and blasting the campus with their musical taste. Annoying, but part of the experience.

      

I do know from outfitting my two sons at college that it costs a lot more for that first dorm room than I ever spent.

I think my biggest luxury item was that I had a bar set and some bar glasses. If you wanted a martini, I could make it and serve it properly.

The bar set was a gift from Uncle Phil. It wasn't that he was a booze hound or was even encouraging drinking. He and his wife just had class. If you were having a drink, you should do it right.

They never feature bar sets in the Back To School ads.

College Essentials

Apparently, college essentials now include Easy Mac, Ramen noodles and other assorted microwave food products.



What happened to buying a few Mead composition notebooks 
and a pack of Bic pens?