What I did during my summer vacations

It may be time to pull the plug on summer vacations for school kids.

Say what?

That’s right. According to a recent Time magazine article, summer vacations are an outdated legacy of the nation’s farm economy and are to blame for American children lagging behind many other industrialized countries especially in math scores.

OK, this could explain my poor math skills. Since I was privileged with summer vacations during my youth, this may be the real reason I have trouble balancing my checkbook.

As much as I hate to admit it, the article makes a lot of sense when it points out that summer learning loss is troublesome for children from low-income families who are subjected to inactivity and isolation. Even children from well-to-do families may be falling behind, learning experts claim.

Year-round school with shorter breaks may be the logical thing to do for Americans to catch up academically to the rest of the world. I’m guessing, though, that this kind of education reform would invoke a lot of kicking and screaming.

Summer vacation, for most of us, is and was a sacred time. Countless baby boomers have memories of those idyllic road trips in the station wagon. Of course they’ve long forgotten how hot those cars could get before air-conditioning was a standard feature, or how they’d scrap with their siblings.

“Are we there yet?” was the infamous cry of road-trip warriors.

I loved summer vacations, even though we never went anywhere. When you live on a dairy farm where cows have to be milked morning and night, it’s difficult to get away unless you have a big enough operation to have hired help. Ours was very much a ma-and-pa-and-the-kids operation.

During my entire childhood, we took only one “vacation,” a weekend trip to South Dakota to visit one of my dad’s Army buddies from World War II. I was 10 or 11 and it was the first time we’d ever stayed in a hotel. With a TV a few feet from our bed, we thought we’d died and gone to heaven. We were living large.

Occasionally in the fall, after the harvest was in, we’d manage to get away for a weekend to drive to Port Wing, Wis., where my grandmother lived near the shore of Lake Superior. Those were glorious trips filled with memories of scavenging for driftwood along the shore and playing in the nearby woods.

Even though we never got the quintessential family vacations, our summers were ripe for memory making. I’ve written about the workload that comes with farming (farming was the reason summer vacations were started in 1906 to allow children to share the workload). But there was plenty of down time for us, too.

I remember one summer when my younger brother and I spent much of the summer “playing house” in a treehouse we cobbled together by ourselves in the woods. We also used to pretend we were Cubby and Karen, the singing duo from the Mouseketeers. Another summer we converted an old brooder house into a clubhouse, complete with a password, and kept our pet rabbits there.

We played cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians and “Army,” a war game that came with making hand grenades out of mud.

It makes me sad that most kids these days don’t have those same kind of opportunities to play with reckless abandon and make believe whatever they want.

Truth is, with all the regimented youth sports and summer camps, America already has its foot in the door for a schedule that further erodes unscheduled time for kids. Maybe year-round school wouldn’t be such a big leap after all.

Still, summer vacation is one of those time-honored American traditions that will be tough to give up.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com