Kids in Boston and many other local districts go back to school the day after Labor Day. Others are already there. Either way, school always starts around now, and it always has, because kids had to spend the summer at work on the farm, right?

Not exactly.

“The agrarian model that dominated our educational landscape looked very different from what we have now,” says Kenneth Gold, dean of education at the College of Staten Island. “That’s just the prevailing myth.”

In fact, the familiar September-to-June school year has almost nothing to do with farm kids.

In the early 19th century, rural schools typically had two terms: winter and summer. Yes, summer.

That’s because spring and fall, not summer, were the busiest months on a farm. So rural children helped with planting in the spring, attended school for two or three months in the summer, went back to work for the fall harvest, then did another two or three months of school in the winter.

In cities, meanwhile, many schools operated almost all year. They often divided the year into four quarters, each ending with a week’s vacation. New York City schools, for example, were open for 248 days in 1842 — far more than the 180 days we now consider standard.

“Schools in the cities were essentially open year round, but that doesn’t mean there was anything close to year-round attendance,” says Gold, who wrote “School’s In: The History of Summer Education in American Public Schools.” “We’re talking in days before there were any compulsory education laws.”

But by the second half of the 19th century, things had begun to change.

In 1852, Massachusetts became the first U.S. state to enact a compulsory public education law. It required cities and towns to offer schooling and set fines for parents who didn’t send their children. Other states soon followed suit.

Meanwhile, Horace Mann and other reformers were trying to improve school standards — and to make them more, well, standard. So they sought a compromise between the rural and urban calendars, which led to the development of a 180-day school year. By 1900 or so, most states were taking control of education and mandating that 180-day calendar.

See You In September …

But why start school now, and not at some other equally (apparently) random time of year?

It may be less about when to start studying, and more about when to stop playing.

As the school year was becoming standardized, city schools were also moving to accommodate the schedules of wealthy families who vacationed in the summer — and of the businesses they led. Before air conditioning, summer was a popular time to get out of town.

Meanwhile, the rural schools’ summer term was already considered deficient. That’s partly because more women taught in summer, more men in winter, and women were less respected, and partly because the summer attracted more young students. In a one-room schoolhouse, that meant the overall level of work in summer was lower.

“It was less academically rigorous; it was inferior,” Gold says. “There was inferior learning going on in the summer.”

And, with summers off, teachers could now prepare for the year and receive training. Reformers hoped that would encourage the strongest candidates to become teachers.

The Dream Of An Endless Summer

The idea that our school year comes from the farm isn’t the only legend around. Summer vacation itself has taken on an almost mythic stature in modern U.S. culture.

“There’s a whole sort of mental model of what schooling is,” says Jack Gillette, dean of Lesley University’s graduate school of education. “It goes all the way to the fact that ‘one teacher, one classroom’ is the norm — and attached to that is also the fact that school begins in the fall and ends in late spring, early summer.”

Indeed, a whole range of habits and services has grown up around that model: summer camps, amusement parks, family vacations, tourism and more.

Despite concerns over summer learning loss, especially for low-income students, the tradition of summer vacation offers a clear benefit to businesses: With no school, families have a chance to spend money they wouldn’t be able to otherwise.

So, even as many districts across the nation move to an August start, there’s an economic incentive to stick with September. For instance, last year a Maryland task force voted to recommend pushing the start of public school until after Labor Day, a move that proponents said would bring an extra $7.7 million in tax dollars and $74.3 million in economic activity.

“Of course there are large and powerful industries whose whole period of business is during the summer,” says Gold. “Summer has become such a huge cultural phenomenon.”

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