Should Schools Be Countercultural?
Do we prepare kids for the “real world” or give them an oasis from it?
Every summer, a trip to the grocery store spelled the beginning of the end for my kids.
When they were little, they’d come with me each weekend to pick up the food for the week. They usually enjoyed it — at least until they got to the seasonal aisle. You see, at the beginning of the summer, the seasonal aisle would be full of fun summer stuff — sparklers, picnic supplies, pool noodles. But then — often, cruelly, right after the Fourth of July — they’d encounter something depressing in the seasonal aisle: school supplies.
Gone were the water guns and coolers; in their place were pencils, notebooks, and lunch boxes. Sometimes my kids would literally refuse to look down that aisle because it told them what they knew was inevitable but preferred to ignore: Summer would have an end, and that end was closer than they wanted it to be.
There’s something bittersweet about the last few weeks of summer. Kids (and teachers) realize that soon they’ll be rising before the sun and living their lives according to the dictates of the bell. The end of summer constitutes, for many kids, the end of one way of living and the beginning of another.
