Serendipity35

I've been away for a week taking one son back to college in MD and then visiting my other son at school in VA. No computer access, so I had a somewhat blissful break from technology (OK, there was some withdrawal pain, and 240 email messages waiting).

One thing I've been thinking about is the whole back-to-school-September ritual.

Why are we still using a school calendar from the agrarian days when farm families needed the kids home to work?

Milton Chen, executive director at the George Lucas Educational Foundation, wrote two pieces on this.

He mentioned a twelve-year-old report from the U.S. Department of Education's National Education Commission on Time and Learning, entitled "Prisoners of Time" that said:

"Our schools . . . are captives of the school clock and calendar. We have been asking the impossible of our students, that they learn as much as their foreign peers while spending only half as much time in core academic subjects."

Seven million K-12 educators and staff and fifty-five million students and families are programmed into this calendar. I've been conditioned since I was five to "start again" in September, so that January 1 hardly seems like a new year any more.

No other sector of our society runs on years of 180 days or 36 weeks and there are a number of other calendar plans that have been suggested. I've heard all the criticisms including the need to add air-conditioning in schools and the ire of summer camps and vacation resorts - most of the criticism is about money rather than learning.