School’s
out, and life suddenly gets more complicated for someone who works at
home. Every year, I wonder why kids get the summer off. You may have
been told long ago that it’s an agricultural thing, because farm kids
worked the crops during the summer. That doesn’t make much sense, since
the real work of growing crops is planting, which is done by the time
school is out, and harvesting, which happens after school starts in the
fall. That explanation is a myth.
Before the Civil
War, farm kids never had summers off. They went to school during the
hottest and coldest months and stayed home during the spring and fall,
when crops needed to be planted and harvested. Meanwhile, city kids hit
the books all year long—summers included. In 1842, Detroit’s academic
year lasted 260 days!
The summer school vacation evolved in phases, and you can read
the whole story of how it happened at mental_floss.
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