How Do Our Children Spend the Summer Vacation?

With the coming of September, summer gathers up its trailing skirts and makes ready to depart, and people are visited by a feeling of joy at the approach of autumn, and with it the opening of the schools and the children's return to their lessons... For most parents are not at ease about the "way" their children spend the summer vacation — most of the time they are prey to empty activities. If they are at a mountain summer resort, the only amusement is the evening strolls along the brown paths, or turning in at a café to refresh oneself with a cooling glass, and waiting for bedtime by whiling it away in a cocktail of conversations that touch on their subjects with the lightest of touches, with no depth and no whetting of the mind. And if our children are on the coast, there is no more spacious haunt for the hours of their days than the beaches, and no more poisoned breathing-hole for their sorrows — and pasture for their burning emotions — than the cinema houses.

And we parents — as a rule — are seized by anxiety and fear that the halter has slipped from our hands, or all but slipped. In vain do we try to guide our children, to bring them to read and to order their time fruitfully; despite all our attempts, the voice of society's temptations remains dearer to their ears and closer to their tastes than any improving program we might join with them in drawing up — only for it to remain, in the end, ink on paper!

These basic problems are not solved by the ending of summer and our children's return to school, for another summer will come in its season, and another and another, and with every vacation the same problems will arise anew, their gravity growing worse year after year — unless we set about treating them with earnest, conscious effort, and prepare for our children, with regard for their ages and their natural inclinations, fields of innocent recreation that hold benefit and pleasure at once... And what is the color of these fields?

We all watch with great delight the artistic renaissance that has lately begun to bud and unfold in the circles of our society, and we all dream that our children may be given the chance to play the parts that were never given to us. Would that our homes were a stage for music, folk dancing, acting, and drawing, and would that our children were their heroes... But the time? Where are they to find the time to realize this dream, when their school programs are loaded beyond the capacity of their minds?

Here the importance of the summer vacations stands out, and the possibility of using them as an opening into these fields. Let us quicken the local clubs that work for these ends, and gather a cluster of youngsters here and a cluster there, matched in age and inclination, working together under expert supervision — as the nucleus of a musical band in which all kinds of instruments play toward a single goal, or of a troupe for acting or folk dancing or drawing...

It is my conviction that once our children's mental and manual activity is given direction, once their vital energy is burned up in the service of absorbing, fruitful work, and they are given freedom to express sincerely what lies hidden within them, their talents will awaken and ripen, and there will die down in them that unruly craving for the idleness which today drives them along in its sweeping currents... All we need is for those in charge to take the matter in hand before the disease spreads unchecked, and the ripe fruits we had wanted as nourishment for the darlings of our hearts are lost from before our eyes...