Taking Back August

A call to (sunburned) arms.

These are polarized times. We can’t agree on what constitutes reality, let alone, say, what our approach to trade policy should be. But I think everyone, no matter how brainwashed they are by their particular filter bubble, can agree on this: Kids returning to school before the beginning of August is some bullshit.

I have two boys, one in high school and one in middle school. The high schooler recently returned to school on July 31. July 31!

If July 31 had fallen on a Monday, maybe I could understand it. But it was on Thursday—just some random weekday. Surely it wouldn’t have killed them to wait one more day, sparing kids the symbolic cruelty of sitting in school in July, the most summery of summer months.

It’s all enough to make one channel his inner The Wall–era Roger Waters. But instead of teachers, it’s bureaucrats obsessed with administrative convenience who need to leave those kids alone.

Is my argument backed by evidence? Do you need evidence to know that ending kids’ summer while swimming pools remain open for five more weeks is kind of a dick move?

But this isn’t just about the torment that an abbreviated summer inflicts on kids. It’s also about the anguish it deprives them of. Because a properly long summer eventually becomes a painfully boring summer. And that’s valuable.

I speak from experience. When I was 12, the space between the beginning of August and the start of school felt like a minor eternity. This triggered some pretty profound cognitive dissonance.

On the one hand, I was bored out of my fucking mind. I’d done all of the summer things many times over. The tires on my cheap Huffy dirt bike were worn bald. My skin was the color of tobacco. I’d watched more episodes of He-Man: Masters of the Universe than any person of any age should be expected to endure. Our family’s pirated VHS tape of Police Academy was completely shot on account of all the fast-forwarding to the Michael Winslow parts.

And yet I did not want to go back to school. Anything was better than school, even lame Bozo Show reruns. Sadly, though, the TV was mostly off limits to us kids by the time August rolled around. Our babysitter, tired of us interfering with her daily soaps, leveraged her despotic powers to decree an outside-all-day rule for me and my brothers, save for a brief lunchtime. And if we lingered too long over our bologna-and-white-bread sandwiches, she’d send us out for a mandatory picnic.

Being outdoors all day is a different beast in August. The sun, affable and orange in June and July, has become a spiteful white furnace, dispensing punishing heat for its own amusement.

But the sun wasn’t our most formidable foe. That designation belonged to another adversary—one we could neither see nor feel, but which pressed up against us in a way that made us deeply uncomfortable: boredom.

A long summer break doesn’t come without a price. The cost of weeks on end of unstructured free time is becoming intimately acquainted with a whole new species of boredom. Unshackled from adult-imposed routine, the responsibility falls to you—a kid—to figure out how to entertain yourself all day, every day, for 90 days straight. It sounds great in June, but by Day 50 you’re secretly jonesing for someone, anyone, to tell you what to do.

So by August, my brothers and I began to see summer break in a more complicated light. We’d expected to be coddled by summer, and here it was challenging us, egged on by its energy-vampire henchman, boredom. The situation called for some real innovation. The time for kickball and bike ramps was well behind us. We had to get a little bit crazy.

Fortunately, our environment was well-suited for that. Our family’s bungalow had been built on 2.5 acres of land previously occupied by a trailer court. The trailers had long departed, but relics of the park remained, including an abandoned office building and a cinder-block laundry room. The property also included an apple orchard whose trees our family never bothered to harvest.

It was there, in the shade of the apple orchard, that one of our most recklessly ingenious boredom-killing ideas emerged. One moment we were inspecting the rotting apples, the next we were embroiled in an all-out rotten-apple war, launching apples at each other’s sunburned bodies with all the force we could muster. Using the trees’ slender trunks as shields, we imagined ourselves as John Rambo or John Matrix from Commando. It was stupid, and it was awesome.

Another time, one of my brothers and I were beating around the yard when we noticed a colony of bees had taken up residence in the old cinder-block laundry room. Boredom-crazed, we decided it was our duty to fight off the buzzing intruders. We armed ourselves with Wiffle ball bats and, with what in our minds was ninja-like agility, began hammering away at the colony.

I was stung fewer times than my brother. But one of the bees managed to get me near my eye, which swelled to closing. It was stupid. It hurt. It wasn’t awesome.

Another boredom-fighting enterprise took us on a dirt bike ride to a nearby clay pit. Surveying the scene, we decided it would be good idea to race our bikes to the bottom, unfazed by the fact that it had recently rained and the clay was thick and wet. Once we reached the bottom, our bikes began to sink. Before long, the red clay nearly reached the stripes on our tube socks. I had to slip my feet out of my shoes to free myself, and then pry them out of the mud with my hands. I’d like to tell you our parents were understanding—that they laughed about our ruined shoes. But that would be untrue.

In one sense, rotten-apple fights, bee colony attacks, and wet clay pit excursions are all very dumb ideas. But if you never do dumb stuff, you never learn where the line between smart and dumb lives. You, at least sometimes, have to cross that boundary to find it. And the journey that leads there often starts with boredom.

That, I think, is the best case for longer summer breaks. The current school schedule, while rooted in well-intentioned efforts to curb learning loss and improve standardized test scores, hasn’t made a meaningful dent in either. At this point, it supports operational efficiency more than it serves the needs of kids.

You may argue that the current generation wouldn’t take advantage of a longer summer if they had it—that they’d stay cloistered in their houses playing video games and watching YouTube. But that’s a different problem, and one well worth attacking on a different front.

On this front, though, I stand firm on the idea that kids deserve August and everything that comes with it: more freedom and fun, yes. But also more boredom and the boundary-pushing (and, yes, dumb) behavior that it inspires.