Summer Is the Time for Kids to Chill Out
You see them everywhere. Kids on their way to school.
The poor things.
Lugging backpacks full of homework and wearing worried looks not because of a rapidly approaching storm but because of a rapidly approaching quiz, these youngsters are growing up far too fast.
Remember June, July and August? The ancients referred to them as “the summer months.” If you were a kid, they had a specific purpose: You were supposed to spend them goofing around.
Think of the opening shot of the “The Andy Griffith Show.” Opie is heading down the dusty road with a fishing pole.
That is what our young people should be doing with their summers.
The youth of our nation -- the future of our country -- have no business being in school now. Going to school is something you do from September through May. An extension can be granted into June, but only in emergencies -- like to make up for too many snow days.
Has any student ever retained any fact imparted during summer session? Multiplying fractions is best done when leaves are turning brown. How can you expect someone to conjugate verbs when it’s 75 degrees outside?
I bet Einstein never went to school in the summer.
Yes, the experts have practical reasons for turning the calendar inside out and pretending that all months are created equal. Schools are overcrowded, so year-round sessions can’t be avoided. Students forget everything when they’re off for three months. Teachers get burned out less if they can break up the grind of nine straight months of teaching. Parents won’t go nuts from having their kids running loose for three months.
Good reasons all, but they artfully dodge the key point: Summer is meant for playing. It’s meant for hanging around and chewing bubble gum. It’s meant for taking a family vacation. Nobody wants to hear a class report on “What I Did on My Track 3 Vacation.”
Do we really want our children to lose the romance of summer? Not to mention summer romances.
All of us of a certain age have stories of how we left school in May with one view of the world only to return in September feeling totally different. What was it about summer that produced such radical transformations and created so much of the poetry in our lives?
When I think of the great moments from my childhood, almost everything in the top 10 happened during the summer. Come to think of it, a lot of the disasters, too. Just because I had time on my hands didn’t mean I made the right call.
The summer’s heat loosens inhibitions. We’re bolder, more exuberant. It’s life without detention or 500-word essays due first period. What’s the mystery? Summer rocks because you don’t have an algebra exam the next day.
It’s life lived freely, for one of the few times that we can actually do that and get away with it.
Do we really want to take that away from our kids?
All practicality and cost-efficiency aside, they deserve summers. The shame is that some still get them, while others don’t.
You could argue they’ll never know what they’re missing if July seems just like February. Seems to me, however, they’ll someday discover they’re a bit out of the American mainstream when they’re the only ones without summer stories to tell.
County fairs, reading Harry Potter till 2 a.m., trying to kindle a romance, heading off to the park to play ball, getting a weird haircut, hitting the malls till closing time, spending three hours in the library, staying up late watching a movie on the new DVD player
Is doing any of that stuff today as much fun if you have to go to school tomorrow?
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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.
