Hasn’t President Barack Obama caused enough damage, now the man wants to end summer vacation for American students, and now he has enlisted Time Magazine’s help in pushing the propaganda that summer vacation is a relic from the past when children worked on the farm in the summer months. Who cares how summer vacations became the norm in our school system? It has become an American institution, a time when our students can engage in free and unstructured time. But free time is always dangerous to a government/media bureaucracy that is drunk with power.

Heck (yes why not throw Hitler’s name into the mix, of course War69.com does not think Obama is Hitler, only a PC media fool would make the simplistic statement that throwing out Hitler’s name crazily implies that the two leaders are one in the same, but sane individuals use the Hitler comparison to make illustrations of what one of the world’s worst tyrannical dictators believed in and how a current leader, drunk with power, utilizes similar tools to achieve their own gains).

So even Hitler was against summer vacations, he found the time useful to train the Hitler youth:

The system worked in two phases; first one would be notified that they would be attending the camp, then came the actual call. This was convenient for the youth that held jobs, because with advanced notice they would be able to apply for leave. Those who attended high school would only be drafted during summer vacation, and students at technical schools performed the training during semester breaks. If the training was avoided the youth service law was enforced. This law forced compliance. The experience was intended to produce a meaningful contribution to a boyís readiness for combat and the hard life of a soldier (Rempel 185).

Doesn’t Time magazine realize their time in the sun is over, it is not the 1940’s/1950’s when the magazine could be used as a propaganda vehicle for American administrations. Their weak argument is that poor students are made worse by the lack of schooling during the summer. Nice try Time, look at the quality of schools in poor areas, the crap teachers that can’t be fired because of the crap teacher unions, the single parent homes in which education is not positively emphasized. Those are the real reasons poor students continue to suffer as they get closer to becoming a high school dropout, giving them more crap teaching in the summer is not going to benefit them.

UPDATE: In another tribute to George Orwell’s book “1984″ Obama and Time Magazine continue to spread the myth/lie that summer school vacation was born because of the need for our children to work on the farms, call it the Agrarian School Vacation Myth:

David Von Drehle’s TIME cover story on summer learning loss is interesting as these things go, and gives attention to both a serious problem and some praiseworthy initiatives to address it. But this line just about drove me bonkers.

Long summer holidays are the legacy of our vanished agrarian past, when kids were needed in the fields during the growing season.
This is one of those things that “everyone knows” but is just not true. As my former colleague Elena Silva has written:

Time in school has been added and subtracted in many ways throughout our country’s history, although not always for obvious reasons. School schedules varied considerably by locality early in our country’s history with some schools open nearly year round and others open only intermittently. In large cities, long school calendars were not uncommon during the 19th century. In 1840, the school systems in Buffalo, Detroit, and Philadelphia were open between 251 and 260 days of the year. New York City schools were open nearly year round during that period, with only a three-week break in August. This break was gradually extended, mostly as a result of an emerging elite class of families who sought to escape the oppressive summer heat of the city and who advocated that children needed to “rest their minds.” By 1889, many cities had moved to observe the two-month summer holiday of July and August. Rural communities generally had the shortest calendars, designed to allow children to assist with family farm work, but they began to extend their school hours and calendars as the urban schools shortened theirs.

Here is President Obama and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan spreading the agrarian myth of summer vacation and making their dictatorial push to end summer vacation for American students in October of 2009, call it The War On Summer Vacation:

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that earlier this year, Obama was entertaining thoughts of extending school years, and school hours:

“Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas. Not with Malia and Sasha, not in my family and probably not in yours. But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom.”
In an interview with the AP, Education Secretary Arne Duncan says our calendar needs to be up to date with the times, considering it was made when most of the U.S. was working the fields. Not many students work the fields anymore.

He also says that longer days would mean better test scores. While many schools have seen major improvements in their test scores — partially due to longer class times — in my experience, standardized tests aren’t a very good barometer for anything except how well someone can take a test.

The Seattle Post Intelligencer defends summer vacation:

In response I must climb the sunny ramparts and raise a defense in the name of unstructured time and family values because I believe summer is still one of the best things we have going for us in this great land.

Once again here is the Obama lackey Arne Duncan:

“Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

Again the real reason our public school system is in shambles: Low quality schools, low quality teachers, low teacher pay, inability to fire crap teachers because of bully teacher unions, single parent homes, education not lauded as a way out of the inner city (just listen to rap music to see what values inner city youth hold up as important), inner city kids have no access to elite private schools because of teacher unions blocking school vouchers with their bully lobbying tactics, and sometimes American students just don’t give a crap about education and changing the above won’t change them, some students will never change no matter what opportunities are presented to them.

Fix the things above, don’t take away summer vacation, but it all doesn’t matter, only two more years before Obama is replaced in 2012.

UPDATE: One more myth buster:

While it is true that kids in many other countries have more school days, it’s not true they all spend more time in school.

Kids in the U.S. spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the U.S. on math and science tests — Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days).