Over the past thirty years, I have seen the change in students’ attitudes toward school, work, life, family, and all the rest. This change doesn’t apply to all, of course, but the trend is unmistakable, and my view here is commonly held among those in my peer group of educators. I wish none if this were so, and I don’t go around looking for evidence to prove a point; I don’t have to, as I’m confronted with it every day.

Permissive parenting and an undisciplined society are the culprits. American schools used to turn out students who were vastly better prepared for the real world than students are today, yet teachers are nowadays better prepared to teach, and schools are much better funded now than they were in the 1950s and 1960s. The implementation of year-round school schedules is a high-profile idea that has more potential for creating debate than for moving the needle. Why on earth would one want to do more of the same of something that already doesn’t work?

Our problems with the public schools are social in nature, and that’s the trouble. I remember a day long, long ago when I was finishing up my last semester of teacher certification courses. Our professor handed out slips of paper to all of us, so that we could suggest a topic that would be the focus of that day’s discussion. I wrote something like, “The problems with today’s public schools are a reflection of our society’s problems. How much success can we expect from attempting to solve our social problems at the school level, and what impact does this have on the core task of teaching students how to think?” That was 1978. Sure, we had our concerns then, as we were still reeling from the effects of the social revolution of the 1960s. But I’d be more than happy to be teaching a class of students from that era. And I shudder to think of the results I’d receive from today’s students if I required the quantity of work that my professors expected from me and my fellow students “when I was in school” (rolling eyes here).

Students today are just as intelligent as those of any previous generation, and I still love working with them. Moreover, I am often impressed by their mastery of communications technology. Still, their ability to solve problems, to be able to organize their findings and articulate them in written form is woefully underdeveloped. They need to be challenged; they need to feel the struggle. Success should not be easy, and it certainly should not be guaranteed. Looking for the class that will give them the “easy B” isn’t in their long range interests. Watering down curricula because students aren’t submitting quality work doesn’t do any of us any good. Giving students a “pass” for simply warming a seat is counter-productive. A computer programmer I know once said to me that the standard in his industry is driven by the refrain, “garbage in, garbage out.” That saying has much broader application than to just the computer field.

In my mother and father’s family, the older children born in the 30′s had it much, much harder than the younger children born in the late 40′s and 50′s. There were wealthy people with spoiled and pampered children but they were not really the norm in the Depression Era and shortly thereafter. Heck, that may have been the catalyst to spoil children so afterward when they could.

I don’t think this sounds the way you intended…are you saying that those who grew up in the Great Depression did NOT work to ensure the next generation had it better?

Has not every generation since the beginning of time contributed to what we have become? With the exception of those who grew up in The Great Depression, every parent has slaved to give their child more than they had and for their child NOT to struggle as they did. It was all very well meaning and without the slightest idea that such would be wrong. It is interesting to me that you equate that with what you call a “crisis of values”. Children did once have to work, and work darned hard for all they got and then some. Is that what you want to go back to? Are you referring to spoiled children or children without parental guidance and rules, or both?

Crazy me, I thought the manifest purpose was (predicate word) education.

My biggest problem with those who favor year-round schools is their assumption that more hours in the classroom—or a greater frequency of hours spent in the classroom—will result in greater academic achievement. I suppose for the purposes of the “kill and drill” way in which we adhere to standardized tests, this might be true. Unfortunately, this approach is wholly dependent upon recall- and knowledge-level learning, which is not learning at all. If year-round schools mean more of this, there will be no gain in true academic mastery of concepts and ideas.

Moreover, I will never understand the argument that singles out children from urban environments as being beneficiaries of year-round schools in greater proportion to those from suburban or rural environments. I suppose when one is factoring in subsidized meals and after-school activities, this would make sense, but these have only a very tenuous relationship to academic achievement.

On the other hand, continuing with our current schedule is less disrupting to families, employers, and the tourist industry. But then, is it the responsibility of the public schools to fit in where it is most convenient for either of these? If Americans really supported high educational achievement, I would think that everyone outside of public education would adjust their schedules accordingly. Priorities are priorities, after all. And as far as employers are concerned, there are plenty of adults who are available year-round, and who could use some supplemental income in an economy that is limping along at best.

Then there is this: increasing numbers of American teens now prefer to remain unemployed dependents of their parents during the summer months, and parents are increasingly accepting this as the new normal. Of those who do get jobs, there is growing dissatisfaction about their job performance from both employers and customers. Speaking from personal experience, the entrepreneurs I know have a far higher opinion of the work ethic of older workers than they do of the younger generation’s. So where’s the gain here?

We have a crisis of values in this country. An entire generation of young people have been allowed to think that they are entitled to things they don’t work for; no amount of adjustment to the public school schedule is going to solve this. Schools need to seriously concentrate on meaningful ways to raise the academic bar.

More rigorous instruction in the public schools, and enforcement of higher expectations from families are the keys to higher academic performance. Anything less is simply nibbling around the edges.