Our Children Aren't Economic Inputs!
Conor Clarke thinks that we ought to get rid of summer vacation for school children. I disagree! High performing kids at intense schools are stressed enough as it is — there’s more to life, and especially more to childhood, than test score achievement. I wouldn’t trade the summers of my youth for a better competitive edge today against the average Japanese worker. Kids in the worst schools aren’t going to benefit much by being cooped up there through the summer months.
Of course, some kids would benefit. I haven’t any objection if they choose to attend summer school. When I have kids, however, summer is going to be a lovely reverie when I get to enjoy their company more than I do during the school year — when there’s time after work for pickup basketball in the driveway before it gets dark, and the lack of school allows road trips, vacations to visit the grandparents, trips to museums, etc. Do I place a higher value on the math scores of my children or the relationships they cultivate with their family and friends? The latter!
Conor notes — let’s assume correctly — that this whole conversation is tied up with questions about equality of opportunity:
One issue that doesn’t come up enough in discussions of extending the school year is that doing so is also, fundamentally, an issue of economic fairness. If you believe in equality of opportunity, then one of the most important things the state can do is provide some baseline level of education that seeks to alleviate vast differences of class. But, small though it may seem, one of the most profound ways in which class differences express themselves is over the summer vacation.
This is because wealthy parents can afford to given their children all sorts of edifying summer experiences that downscale parents cannot.
Okay, I’m all for addressing that inequity, but I’d prefer a method that doesn’t rob the wealthy kids — and the middle class kids if my childhood summers are any indication — of those edifying summer experiences. Give me Pareto optimality, please! Besides, kids already spend enough time within a public education system that teaches conformity and deadens love of learning. Let them take their summers outside the system, experiencing life, and getting value that it is difficult to represent on blog charts.
The most basic edifying experience—having a real period of time in which you aren’t stuck in routine activities that adults are dictating to you—is one that’s open to rich, middle class, and poor children alike.
Duncan’s position, that there should be a six day school week (which would work out to a nice big “fuck you” to Jews, I take it…), eleven or twelve months a year is much more extreme than usual positions. I can almost convince myself that a year round program with multiple three week breaks is ok. I guess most of what I got out of summer break could’ve been spread around the year, but her position is a whole new kind of crazy.
— Justin · Jun 9, 05:50 AM · #
yeah, i think 3 week breaks are reasonable.
— razib · Jun 9, 06:34 AM · #
Why only kids? I’m not a number – I am a free man!
— Noah Millman · Jun 9, 10:53 AM · #
This post cries out for Sailerian intervention. Conor, if you’re advocating “tracking” in your first paragraph, then I might agree. Otherwise, you’re basically saying that you’d prefer not to help out low-SES kids (in an especially meaningful way) because you’d bore high-SES kids.
Look, there is a really large bit of life that is drudgery pure and simple. Even getting a Ph.D. in the sciences or becoming a Navy SEAL requires the ability to deal with mind-numbing repetition. You can’t mandate out the drudgery in life.
— Klug · Jun 9, 12:32 PM · #
This is the problem with 1-size fits all education — we have to debate this. If we had school choice people could gravitate to the school they felt provided the best education, all year or not.
Secondly, if you take a look at the general state of education in this country, it’s kinda hard to get concerned about what happens OUT of school.
— Brian Moore · Jun 9, 02:08 PM · #
I work as a tutor, part-time, teaching SAT, ACT, GRE and LSATs. One thing I always find myself thinking, after a tutoring session, is that no one could work the job and remain opposed to race-based affirmative action; when you see the degree to which the rich kids are privileged in terms of academic output— the tutoring, the private classes, the educational software, the trips to the museum, the encyclopedia set, the edutainment books, the DVDs, the interactive educational Web experiences, the parents there every day insisting that they improve their academics— well, you see that, and you completely give up on the idea that this is a level playing field.
— Freddie · Jun 9, 02:29 PM · #
Freddie: no one could work the job and remain opposed to race-based affirmative action; when you see the degree to which the rich kids…
How do you pivot from ‘rich kids’ to race-based affirmative action? Given your premises — the tutoring, the private classes, the educational software, the trips to the museum, the encyclopedia set, the edutainment books, the DVDs, the interactive educational Web experiences, the parents there every day insisting that they improve their academics — wouldn’t a ‘means-based’ affirmative action be more responsive to the problem?
— Sargent · Jun 9, 02:49 PM · #
“Look, there is a really large bit of life that is drudgery pure and simple.”
Yes and our kids are not being exposed to enough drugery. We ar falling behind. The drudgery gap is widening even as we speak.
This is one problem with America being the “big dog” as someone in another post kept saying. We feel like we have to remain the big dog, have to stay on top. One example of that is we think we have to train our kds to compete with the Japanese. But what if we were canada or denmark or scotland. Then we could relax. We wouldn’t have to be spending all that money on the military and we could find some balance between productivity and quality of life. So our kids lose a little academic ground in the summer. Kids learn by playing. THe time to play unstructured kids games more than makes up for the small temporary setback in academics. Lets have a sense of balance here people, a sense of what is truely important in this brief life. Let the kids play. It’s beautiful natrual thing.
— cw · Jun 9, 03:01 PM · #
How do you pivot from ‘rich kids’ to race-based affirmative action?…
Because arguments against race-based affirmative action depend on the notion that the system, absent AA, is “fair” or meritocratic, and that everyone is on a level playing field. That simply isn’t true, and isn’t close to true. Once you’ve abandoned that notion, there’s no compelling reason not to want to address the continued underrepresentation of racial minorities in higher education. It is to the benefit of a pluralistic society to have proportionate racial representation in college.
That said, I’d be happy to support means-based affirmative action over race-based, as long as it didn’t result in a large reduction in the number of racial minorities in college.
— Freddie · Jun 9, 03:03 PM · #
That said, I’d be happy to support means-based affirmative action over race-based, as long as it didn’t result in a large reduction in the number of racial minorities in college.
I’d agree to that in a heartbeat.
— Sargent · Jun 9, 03:11 PM · #
Freddie:
Because arguments against race-based affirmative action depend on the notion that the system, absent AA, is “fair” or meritocratic, and that everyone is on a level playing field.
Do you know any fair, sensible person who believes that there is a level playing field? Yes, I’m sure there are quotes from Mark Levin or whoever that say something like this, but do you think that everyone who opposes AA is really that completely blind to lived experience?
It seems to me that one could hold the beliefs that (i) there is not a perfectly level playing field, and (ii) using the government to pass laws that mandate disparate treatment based on racial parentage are still a bad idea.
— Jim Manzi · Jun 9, 03:20 PM · #
It seems to me that one could hold the beliefs that (i) there is not a perfectly level playing field, and (ii) using the government to pass laws that mandate disparate treatment based on racial parentage are still a bad idea.
You’re right, of course, that was hastily said and I apologize.
— Freddie · Jun 9, 03:26 PM · #
One additional point:
Race-based affirmative action hardens the recipient’s identity around an immutable trait. The result is a retrenchment of an irrational pluralism.
Means-based affirmative action is geared toward immanently mutable traits like social advantage and income. The result is a diffusion of an irrational pluralism. Much better, that.
— Sargent · Jun 9, 03:52 PM · #
entrenchment, natch.
— Sargent · Jun 9, 04:03 PM · #
“the parents there every day insisting that they improve their academics”
This is the one that’s most important and much less race- or class-based than most.
— Klug · Jun 9, 04:20 PM · #
Means-based affirmative action would dramatically reduce the number of black and Hispanics at top-ranking colleges. A statistic that sticks in my mind is that white children from households with $25,000 incomes have higher SAT scores than black children from households with $75,000. Any honest discussion of race-based and means-based affirmative action would have to take these facts into account.
Freddie’s leap from what rich parents do to how we should reward black children strikes me as a total non sequitur. But almost everything Freddie says strikes me as a non sequitur. I doubt that productive discussion is possible. My primary goal, politically, is to ensure that the Freddies of the world never have the power to put me in a re-education camp, as Freddie’s comrades have put so many of my soulmates.
— y81 · Jun 9, 11:45 PM · #
Are we talking Stalin here? Mao? Who are the gulag loving comrads of Freddie?
— cw · Jun 10, 01:11 AM · #