School's out! (Flashback).(Brief Article)

As the dog days of summer stretch out in all their yawning glory, you may be sure that somewhere, a man with an advanced degree and a mean streak is muttering under furrowed brow, "Why aren't those kids in school?"

The average length of the American public school term is 180 days, not much more than the 173 days of the 1935-36 school year. Summer vacation remains the golden season of childhood, the mellow months when boys and girls store up memories and explore the fields and hills and streets where they live. But like the metric system and soccer, year-round schooling is a nuisance cause that busybodies will not give up.

Proponents of the August schoolday have frequently regarded children as the ductile means to some great national end, whether economic or military. In 1960, Grace and Fred M. Hechinger warned readers of the New York Times, "The Soviet pupil manages to spend about the same number of hours in school during his ten-year program as the American student does in twelve." (These well-drilled pupils would go on to build the Mir space station and conquer Afghanistan.)

The Hechingers referred to American children as an "army of intellectual manpower." In A Nation at Risk, the ballyhooed 1983 report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, Americans were accused of committing "unilateral educational disarmament" because we permitted our kids to spend their Julys running through strawberry fields rather than sitting in a classroom under artificial light reading textbooks about the environment.

Once the Soviet Union collapsed into its deserved junkheap, the summer-school scolds discovered the Japanese, who incarcerate 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. "International competition" became the rationale for year-round school.

Today, it is the alleged superiority of school to family that drives the ...