NPR – Greg Rosalsky
“Put down those Popsicles. No more sleeping in. Beach time is over. Economists have long hated summer vacation. All those wasted school facilities! All that educational backsliding! Kids are getting dumber! The conventional wisdom is that summer vacation is a relic of agricultural times, when kids had to help their parents on the farm. But the economist William Fischel says that story is completely wrong. “When the U.S. was a farming country, in the 1800s, kids went to school during the summer and winter,” he says. Rural kids had to take fall off for the harvest and spring off for planting. In other words, summer vacation would have “actually worked against the rhythms of agriculture.” Fischel, a Dartmouth economist who retired this year, has done a lot of research on summer vacation. He is also the author of Making The Grade: The Economic Evolution of American School Districts.” (more)