When sworn in last week, Gov. Mark Dayton said he'd focus on education, including year-round school. On behalf of everyone under 18: no.
Think they'd learn much in July? "Students! Ignore your geysering hormones and the bright promise of the day outside, and concentrate on the exports of Peru!"
Have you been in a school in the summer? No AC. They can smell like a brick oven cooking roofing tar and circus manure.
No one looks back on their summers and thinks, "If only I'd been legally obligated to enter a brick-walled institution at 8:45 a.m. and study algebra, I'd be pulling down some of that sweet mathematician cash."
Summer is freedom, and just because adults have to put on serious clothes and spend a precious ration of their mortal allotment in a cubicle doesn't mean our children must.
The encroachment of school upon the hallowed ration of barefooted abandon seems to shrink every year; in my time, the gates swung wide when June came in, and clanged shut in September. School couldn't start until Jerry Lewis sat on a stool and blubbered out a song at the end of the Labor Day Telethon.
Sure, our minds rotted a bit over the long break, and when we went back to school we held our books upside down and stared at the pencils — are these tools of some kind? Do I use them to spear apple slices?
But it all came back, like riding a bike, which we had been doing for the past three months.
