The End of Summer
It's maddening to see kids going back to school so early. Our neighbor to the north, Michigan, has it right: Labor Day. For me, it began as political lesson. I remember writing emails and calling local representatives who told me that the Republicans only held one body (the House or Senate, can't remember), but that when they took control, they'd move the start of school back. Well, Republicans got the majorities, now super-majorities, and it has only gotten worse. August is definitely more summery than May or early June.
But there's more, I think, and that's the end of summer as an idea. Summer long represented a kind of freedom that kids no longer have. The end of exploration. The new school calendar reflects the reality in which kids are always on the clock, shuffled between classes at the sound of a bell, hauled from organized sport to organized camp, organized VBS not so much. It's about keeping the kids confined and efficient, and, also, out of the way. Lost is the idea of fallow ground allowing for the fertility of the imagination. Every step must be monitored.
Rarely does our neighborhood see kids out riding their bikes or climbing trees. They are not swimming in ponds or skipping stones across the lake. No time for that. And no, it's not about education or summer learning loss. If that were the case, the public schools would not have pushed so hard to keep classes online during the pandemic. It's about control, and it ends up in the loss of imagination and a sense of wonder. Take a look at a modern public school, with its locked doors and small windows, with little time outside, and see how far these kids are from nature and things natural.
Liberty can't just be about the right to do something if, in fact, we are raising children to be compliant cogs, divorced from the truth of the rising and setting of the sun, the stream that may be forded, the imagination that might be sparked from a simple walk unscripted. But hey, the kids are going back to school, back to the grind in compliance and docility, no sense of adventure. For in a deeper way, summer's really gone.
The Rev. Dr. Peter Scaer is chairman and professor of Exegetical Theology and director of the M.A. program at Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Ind.
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