Well it’s July folks, and the fish are jumpin’. It’s been less than a month since our last day of school, but I already can’t remember any of our policies or the Four Square rules. No, I haven’t been drinking – I’ve just got That Summer Feeling, as Jonathan Richman calls it. He described it perfectly song:
When there’s things to do not because you gotta
When you run for love not because you oughtta
When you trust your friends with no reason not ta
The joy I name shall not be tamed
And that summer feeling is gonna haunt you one day in your life.
When the cool of the pond makes you drop down on it
When the smell of the lawn makes you flop down on it
When the flat of the land has got the crop down on it
Well when your friends are in town and they’ve got time for you
When you were never hanging around and they don’t ignore you
When you say what you will and they still adore you
Is that not appealing, it’s that summer feeling.
That Summer Feeling is about acceptance, connection, abundance, and fun. In the summer of 2021 it is amplified by the lifting of covid restrictions – it’s been a long, lonely winter indeed, piled on top of what was already increasing isolation for many individuals in our society. Please remember the giddy euphoria of these days, the fresh openness of possibilities, and the distinct sense that life is not a fait accompli, because it’s a first-hand taste of what our school offers students every day of the school year, and even on breaks and through the summer, when they take their self-directed sensibility with them into the world.
Almost all of us, provided we have a safe and comfortable home and are otherwise well, love summer. The light is endless; the warmth invites intimacy. For students enrolled in conventional institutions, it is a time of immersion in real life, released as they are from the compulsory agendas of educators. They finally get to live their own lives a little and see what that feels like. They get to focus on what’s important to them. They get to be outdoors and run and play and linger. For many, the best friendships and deepest bonds are made in the expanse of summer freedom. I remember clearly that as a kid I always felt the most activated – the most alive and most myself – during those blessed days between school years.
There is a concept in conventional education called, “the summer slide,” which claims that during summer vacations school children lose some of the skills and knowledge they gained during the school year (summer is bad for education). But the data (see Cooper et all, 1996 for a summary) this concept is based on actually shows more nuanced results: no decline in reading ability, a slight decline in math calculation ability, and a significant increase in math reasoning ability. Math calculation refers to the ability to perform arithmetic by hand (or “in one’s head”). Math reasoning, on the other hand, refers to comprehension of math concepts and the ability to apply those concepts to solve problems. In other words, math reasoning is the part of mathematical knowledge relevant to real life, whereas math calculation is relevant primarily to school. The “summer slide,” therefore, only describes a problem for conventional educators, not for the people who are their students (who are thriving during the summer). Although the studies focus on reading and math, I wonder if we could extrapolate and put forward the hypothesis that, during the summer, school-skills decrease and life-skills increase.
Of course, it comes as no surprise to us at Hudson Valley Sudbury School that real life is what prepares young people for real life; our program is predicated on exactly that idea, as logical as it is bold. We’re grateful to have access to a school which carries the freedom and intimacy of summer forward into the “academic year.” At our school, students may continue to be outdoors, run, play, linger, and become themselves all year long. They may continue to learn things like math as ways of thinking and engaging with the world rather than as discrete objects of (apathetic, often painful) study. They may continue to focus on whatever is important to them, and maybe most important of all, they may continue to focus on what is most important to most of us, and always will be: relationships and connection.
If there is a lesson we can learn from summer, it is that we don’t need school. We need time, we need space, and we need each other. We need to find places we can grow. Please enjoy your summer, and please rest easy knowing that for the young people you take care of, it won’t have to end in September.