Minneapolis Public Schools are sending homework packets home for the holidays. They went out late, without warning, 35-40 pages of miscellanious exercises. Hardly anybody is exactly cheering.
Steve Peha from North Carolina is quoted in today's Strib: "Over the typical two week Christmas vacation, there's hardly enough time to forget anything useful." Patty Kendall, a parent, says, "I believe that they should stay in the habit of doing some sort of assignment every day." Both are pretty clearly right.
The Hebrews insisted on the Sabbath, sacred time. It is hedged around and protected. From Exodus:
Remember that thou keep holy the sabbath day.
Six days shalt thou labour, and shalt do all thy works.
But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God;
Thou shalt do no work on it, thou nor thy son, nor thy maidservant,
Nor thy beast, nor the stranger that is within thy gates.
For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and the sea, and all things that are in them,
And rested on the seventh day, and sanctified it.
Early on in Hamlet, when we are beginning to get clued in that something is rotten in Denmark, Marcellus says:
Good now, sit down, and tell me, he that knows,
Why this same strict and most observant watch
So nightly toils the subject of the land,
And why such daily cast of brazen cannon,
And foreign mart for implements of war;
Why such impress of shipwrights, whose sore task
Does not divide the Sunday from the week;
What might be toward, that this sweaty haste
Doth make the night joint-labourer with the day:
Who is't that can inform me?
In the spirit of kids being let out for Christmas vacation, we have the remnant of old tradition of sacred time. When public institutions honor and acknowledge that tradition, they proclaim everyone's solidarity. We all need a break. We all need not to worry for a while. To re-affirm that sacred space and sacred time are sacred, or to nibble them away, for pretty good reasons --- that's teaching too, big time, places in the heart teaching.
When schools make homework half as good as kissing, kids won't forget in two weeks, and we won't have to send home extra packets over the holidays. Let's work on the problem from that angle, and keep our muddy little hands off 4000 years of human tradition, just possibly ratified by You Know Who.