The Bell Curve:

What continues inappropriately to be called summer vacation for school kids ended this week. I say inappropriately because what used to be a summer vacation is becoming just more of the same old, same old. For a growing number of kids, school hasn’t just taken up again. It never quit last May. The opportunity to draw a deep breath and smell the roses that we once called summer vacation is looking as archaic as truly amateur athletics. Or civilized political campaigns.

And what whole generations are losing as a result is the satisfaction and exhilaration — while it is still possible — of planned indolence.

This hit me as a sad state of affairs as I read a piece last week in the Los Angeles Times about how a growing cadre of K-12 kids spend their summers. Kids like the Cal Tech wannabe who required five hours of homework every night all summer on special studies designed to beef up his credentials. Or the 15-year-old who fulfilled a laundry list of requirements in summer school so she could take more college preparatory classes during the regular school year.

I know that the contest for acceptance in “good” universities is the driving force in most vacation-less summers. But there seems to be little or no consideration of what is being lost as a result.

It reminds me of the Olympic gymnasts — especially the tiny Chinese girls — who must have never experienced mindless play in any of their formative years. The body was fed with discipline and competitive desire, but the soul was too often left standing outside. (Michael Glueck did a fine piece in Wednesday’s Pilot about our attitudes toward this process.)

At the considerable risk of bringing up the good old days again, I believe the lessons I was allowed to learn about indolence — when that’s what summer vacations were indeed about — has made it possible to create balance in my life when it was sorely needed. Still does. I’m not putting down the values of discipline and hard work. I’m just suggesting that, like most virtues, they can be deadly when they can’t be countered by a reservoir of creative indolence.

When I was growing up in northern Indiana, indolence was an art form that we worked at creatively. And we were good.