School is too long, and summer is too short
Plus: 'On the Incarnation of the Word,' paper invites, and more
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“On the Incarnation of the Word”
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1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere
School is too long, and summer is too short

Here’s a pair of recent articles which complement each other well. First, from Stephanie Murray at The Atlantic, “The gravitational pull of supervising kids all the time”:
Compared with children of generations past, modern American kids tend to live under a high degree of surveillance. That’s not to say they have no autonomy. If anything, children today have more say over what they eat and wear than kids have had through much of history—just very few opportunities for “some degree of risk and personal responsibility away from adults,” as a trio of researchers recently put it.
And second, from Peter Gray at After Babel, “Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis”:
You would think it would be obvious that taking away free play and other freedoms to act independently would make children anxious, depressed, and in some cases suicidal, but we adults are remarkably skilled at burying our heads in the sand on this issue. If you read the popular press, you would think the problem is screens and social media, or almost anything else other than the fact that we have more or less locked children up around the clock.
This reminds me: As a kid, despite always doing very well academically and enjoying the learning itself, I would regularly hold forth at length about how much I “hated school” and how “school sucks” and “school is too long” and “summer break is too short” and “year-round school is so stupid” and so on. (I was never in year-round school myself; this was just an early venture into disinterested commentary on matters of public importance.)
Some of my objection to school was definitely just shy adolescent social troubles, but honestly, I think some of it was this, albeit poorly expressed in the emotive language I had available to me at the time.
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