Light, short, and sweet. Just like summer vacation, today’s episode is focused on the question: Why does public education abandon children for two months in the summer, leaving them to their own devices? (Or as a young Paul saw it, give them two months of unbridled freedom, fun, and fire starting?)

Sources:

Short read: Agrarian roots? Think again. Debunking the myth of summer vacation’s origins (retrieved May 2, 2016)

Long read: Gold, K. M. (2002). School’s in: The history of summer education in American public schools (Vol. 25). Peter Lang Pub Incorporated.

Pop Quiz Quote 1:

The rule of the soul over the body is natural, [which makes] the male by nature superior and the female inferior; the one rules and the other is ruled.  The courage of man is shown in commanding, of a woman in obeying. Aristotle

Pop Quiz Quote 2:

While our men seem thoroughly abreast of the times on almost every other subject, when they strike the woman question they drop back into sixteenth century logic. They leave nothing to be desired generally in regard to gallantry and chivalry, but they actually do not seem sometimes to have outgrown that old contemporary of chivalry–the idea that women may stand on pedestals or live in doll houses,… but they must not furrow their brows with thought or attempt to help men tug at the great questions of the world.
Anna Julie Cooper