When I was a school kid, I believed, as an absolute article of faith (of which I was absolutely unaware), that it was by reason of divine mandate that school started right after Labor Day and ended right before Memorial Day. That was just how it was.

In between those two anchors of existence, I hiked and camped, made some money picking cherries, swam in the lake, worked on my First Class requirements for Boy Scouts, learned to sail, tried to figure out how to make gunpowder, spent whole days on the raft at the College Pond, made bread with Nana and listened to stories about my family, put on boots and followed Baker’s Run Creek through all the tunnels in town and on down to Lake Erie, visited 46 states in a series of Chevies, worked at Dad’s book store, read War and Peace and the side panels of Cheerios boxes, drove my uncle’s horses while the men gathered hay, played dominoes with my grandfather – you know, just kind of wasted my time.

Nowadays, around here at least, school starts in mid-August and runs on into June, with summer school nicely filling in the gap between.

Well, I can’t say enough in favor of a few more weeks of homework – I know that extra consumption will help the American paper industry out of a tight economic spot.

And that supplemental time in the classroom will help our teachers feel that they’re really earning those salaries that have made careers in education ever more popular.

But frankly, I’m not sure it’s making anyone any kind of smarter.