If the academic year is the time for working hard, then it follows that summer should be the time for hardly working.
Despite the impeccable logic of the above sentiment, it unfortunately contains more falsehood than truth. The lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer simply don’t exist anymore.
Despite the impeccable logic of the above sentiment, it unfortunately contains more falsehood than truth. The lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer simply don’t exist anymore.
Don’t agree? Perhaps you have fond memories of endless summer afternoons, third-degree beach sunburns, glowing collections of fireflies in jars. Maybe you still hold the ideal of summer “vacation” dear to your heart.
But take a look around. Duke summers don’t play out in weeks of brain-numbing television-binging and anti-intellectualism—or if they do, no one admits it. Instead, LDOC, far from representing the initiation of weeks of happy-go-lucky relaxation, actually ushers in a new era of non-school that bears a striking resemblance to its eight-month, two-semester counterpart.
If you’re a Duke student, chances are that you’ve done your best to pack your summer full of engaging and instructive experiences. If you snagged an internship at a company at the top of the Fortune 500 list, found yourself on track to cure two types of cancer by the end of July or plan to jettison across the ocean to redesign the socioeconomic structure of a small Caribbean island, then congrats: you’re normal. The rest of you better at least have stayed for Summer Session I to finish the credits for your second major.
For anyone who hasn’t signed up to do at least one life-changing, pseudo-academic activity: you have some serious splainin’ to do.
The push for summer productivity isn’t just popular among rabidly ambitious collegiate overachievers. If life’s a race, then volleyball on the beach is an unnecessary pit stop for anyone who intends to win it.
“Outliers”—one of Malcolm Gladwell’s many books designed to deliver insights too shocking to be wrong—bemoans the general inefficiency of summer breaks and blames American culture for its lack of perpetual work ethic. Citing research conducted by Karl Alexander at Johns Hopkins, Gladwell pins the achievement gap between lower-class and upper-class kids on summer stagnation. Rich kids learn during the summer; poor kids don’t—voila! Proof that summer, when left to its own vegetative devices, ruins education.
After my own requisite attempt to singlehandedly save China through summer service, I was shipped home just in time to witness my family’s upper-middle-class efforts at educating my brother during his break from elementary school. The plan involves my mother carting him from science camp to karate lessons, force-feeding him 30 minutes of piano practice every day and painstakingly tracking his reading exploits for the local library’s reading program.
I have no doubt that my brother is learning this summer. Still, the mini-chauffer service set up at my house inspired a pang of nostalgia in my heart for the fabricated summer days of yore. Whatever happened to “Arthur” summers, or the sweaty, halcyon days of “Calvin and Hobbes”?
Because I have few “real summer” memories of my own, I can only guess what I missed out on every summer during my childhood. An organic sense of self-guided independence, perhaps—or the chance to learn something accidentally, without the restrictions of a lesson plan. Whatever it is, every kid who is fed a prepackaged break full of canned summer experiences inevitably trades it in for the sake of continual education.
And to think—Duke students are most likely the children who grew up living those meticulously planned summers. Nothing much has changed. Now, instead of our parents, we organize our own activities, shuttle ourselves to our overbooked days, participate in nominally different programs designed to teach us sterilized facts about the world. Instead of coming back to school with stories about the tornado in a bottle we made in camp, we come back with stories about our innocuous service trip helping the refugees of a tornado-torn village in a third-world country.
But hey, at least we can’t be accused of not working hard enough.
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