Sometimes we would awaken early when the dew was still wet on the grass, feet sliding across the lawn, holding fishing poles purchased at the Big N, worms taken from Mrs. Danielson’s perfect garden next door.

I learned how to gut a fish in summer, how to paint a dock or a door, how to build a fire on the beach, how to boil corn. The things I learned were tactile, simple, but they taught me how to be useful, how to see nature as part of the order of things, how to be scrappy and independent.

The thought police hadn’t come of age back then – this push to reform even summer. Kids could be kids – chase grasshoppers, catch fireflies, take a road trip with the family out west.

Now there’s a lot of talk about the “summer slide,” a phenomenon educators say occurs when there’s too much idle time in the life of a child.

“These kids are losing a full month of learning!” they say, as if the only way to learn is sitting in a front of blackboard.

Researchers are investigating all sorts of antidotes for idle time in the summer, including the year-round classroom. One school district in West Virginia has held year-long classes for the better part of two decades.

The idea that people in America work harder than anyone else in the world still holds true. When I’m out on the road traveling to different countries I see fewer Americans than any other nationality broadening their horizons through travel.

If you ask people in other countries why that is, they say, “Oh, Americans are home working.”

Although it’s hard to pin down the exact number of hours, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that we work more than the English, more than the French, way more than the Germans or Norwegians. Even, recently, more than the Japanese.

And we take less vacation, work longer days, and retire later, too.

I think our quality of life suffers for these numbers, but most disturbing is a willingness on the part of think tanks to put our children on this treadmill too.

To whom do our lives belong? Is our role on earth merely to shovel coal into the national furnace, to buy consumer goods and keep the engines running? Or is there something to be said about learning to start a lawn mower, about camping with your grandfather, about spending an hour on the front porch reading Treasure Island at the age of 10?

I love what one woman wrote in the comment section on a PBS website in reaction to an article they had about summer vacation:

“I grew up in a low-income but stable family. Our only travel consisted of very-occasional camping in a tent at a park down the road. Without summers, however, I don’t believe my education would have been nearly as rich. We had a garden, went to the public library every week, read great books all summer, collected frogs and fireflies, rode our bikes, explored the woods and fields around our home, and helped our parents with whatever they were working on. To believe that children need more and more institutionalized learning is a fallacy. Children need more of their parents and more work-related sharing and learning.”

My thoughts exactly.

Many people think the traditional school calendar is based on farming cycles – that children were needed in the summer to help with the chores when we were a more agrarian society.

But historians say that’s not the case.

The truth is that in the days before air conditioning, schools and entire cities were simply too hot and holding classes in a sweltering classroom made little sense. The wealthy would flee the city heat and head to places like New Hampshire, so summer became the logical time to call off school.

“And by the late 19th century, school reformers started pushing for standardization of the school calendar across urban and rural areas,” says one historian. “So a compromise was struck that created the modern school calendar.”

In other words, the cycles of farming had nothing to do with it.

Which might punch a hole in the theory held by the powers that be who insist that since we’re no longer a true agrarian society, the school calendar should be reformed and our children should sit up straight in school year round.

I’m not always fond of this new world and the ideas bubbling up from this pool of new thought, but robbing kids of the opportunity to be kids is pushing it a little too far.

I’m far more interested in producing a child who has once held a frog in his hand than one who is being trained to spend his life in a cubicle.