Alexander Dunn is an educator, bird watcher, and writer fascinated by the intersections of place, people, nature, and culture. Alex currently works in Museum education and business development at the EcoTarium in Worcester, MA as well as a Natural History Guide with the Mass Audubon at Broad Meadow Brook. With a specialization in place-based education and community programming he serves on numerous boards and teaches bird watching to school age students and adults.

It is easy to equate the pastoral season of green beans and zucchini with New England’s farming history and the nine month school calendar is often misrepresented as a vestige of our agrarian past. Historically, schools in agricultural communities would close for several weeks in the spring and fall allowing students to help their families both plant and harvest the crops. In fact, summer was a quiet time on the farm and so school was often in session. Summer vacation, as we know it today is in fact a modern and entirely urban invention. The summer vacation that spans June to September was created in response to the summer heat and putrid conditions of the early American city.

The second half of the 19th century saw a sweeping shift in U.S. population from the rural to the urban. In 1850 only 15% of the country’s total population lived in urban areas (U.S. Census). By 1920 this number had grown to over 50%.  With this growing population cities became dense and with density brought the age old problem of waste. Streets were clogged with garbage and horse manure, and one can only imagine the conditions of a three story brick school house without fans, air conditioners or even running water. If sweltering summer conditions weren’t enough the Gilded Age was swamped with fears of air born diseases or “miasma,” literally “bad air.” This lead educational reformers like Horace Mann to lobby for a break from the offensive learning conditions of the summer. He hoped time off would not only give students a reprieve from the low hanging heat of the classroom, but also elevate the level of teacher instruction through professional development. Often wealthy families would pull their kids from school and take them to cooler climes. This drop in class size during the summer months was also cited by teachers and bureaucrats as reason to adopt a summer break in the school year.

The urban realities of sweltering summer heat and fabricated fears of miasma coupled with children out of school created what we know as the summer vacation. While it had long been common for the women and children of wealthy families to flee to a summer home, the development of train routes and the advent of the personal automobile made taking a summer vacation obtainable to wider segment of the population. With this growing leisure class came the development of coastal resorts and mountain top lodges within close proximity of the major cities. Seaside resort areas like Newport, the Hamptons, and Martha’s Vineyard retain their famed summer emigration to this day while mountaintop lodges such as Bascom Lodge on Mt. Greylock still offer overnight stays to city dwellers. Mt. Washington once had dueling hotels located above 6000 feet. The Summit House and the Tip Top House, both famed 19th century retreats have since given way to a visitor center and auto road. For the city’s working class locations accessible by public transportation or ferry became popular such as South Boston’s L Street Beach and Coney Island. Both locations that have since been enveloped by urban expansion.

So what does summer vacation mean for today’s city kids? Just as manure and miasma were the real and perceived summer dangers of the industrial age, today’s students face real and perceived dangers that can make for a long, hot summer indoors. The most alarming reality facing kids in the city is the cyclical rise in summer youth violence. A report by the Boston City Council‘s Special Committee on Youth Violent Crime Prevention found that “the violence was all but absent during the hours high school was in session” (City of Boston)  with a measurable increase after school and in the summer. This increased summer violence is often referred to as a “hot summer,” by police, media, and youth workers a frightening euphemism and acknowledgement that some urban realities have not changed.

From an academic standpoint summer vacations have real drawbacks, too. Many teachers report a “summer slide,” or noticeable losses in learning come September. Studies have found that students who are not engaged in camp, summer reading, or other educational program return to school in the fall at a lower academic level than their more engaged peers. A report by the Wallace Foundation notes that “each fall, on average, students perform one month behind where they performed in the spring. Low-income students particularly lose ground in reading while higher income student maintain or gain. Loss is cumulative over time, contributing substantially to an achievement gap by 9th grade.” (Wallace Foundation) These safety, social, and academics concerns have lead some school districts to create a year-round school calendar in which students get shorter two week vacations several times a year but are never out of school for long eight to ten week periods such as the June to September summer vacation.

Besides the stark realities facing children living in the city other factors keeping kids inside are in fact fallacies, like a modern day miasma. The current environmental education (ee) discourse is focused on the increasing disconnect between children and nature. This disconnect has lead prominent ee authors Richard Louv and David Sobel to coin such terms as “nature deficit disorder” and “ecophobia” and launched the North American Association for Environmental Education “no child left inside” initiative. Fear-fueling news reports have elevated the perceived risk of child abduction even though statistics from the FBI show a decrease in the number of actual abductions by a stranger since tracking started in 1992. (CNN)  Many kids who have not had the opportunity or access to nature have a fear of “wild” places, even small, undeveloped parcels of land within a city. These articulated fears range from the over stimulated to the comic: bears, wolves, snakes and lions, getting lost, and even hillbillies are cited as the root of trepidation. For children growing up in a first generation home, attitudes towards nature inherited from parents or grandparents can be clouded by traumatic experiences with war or a utilitarian attitude towards nature in which a forest is only a resource for food gathering or farming further distancing the child from nature. So what do we do?

Environmental educators agree that a life-long environmental ethic is sparked in youth by two important ingredients: time spent in a special, wild place and a caring mentor. Louise Chawla writes that “most environmentalists attributed their political commitment to a combination of two sources: many hours spent outdoors in a keenly remembered wild or semi-wild place… and an adult who taught respect for nature.” Knowing this, how can we position today’s urban kid to find that rare and peaceful place? First, we need to acknowledge that getting kids into the outdoors does not have to be a week long backpacking adventure in the Maine wilderness. Children don’t need wilderness to develop a love of place, what they need is wildness. In his book My Green Manifesto, David Gressner explains the subtle and important difference between these two concepts. “While wilderness might be untrammeled land along the Alaskan coast, wildness can happen anywhere. Wildness is unplanned, unpredictable. You can’t put a fence around it. It can happen in the jungle or on a city river. It rises up when you least expect it.” Wildness is found all round in the small green places that exist in the city: vacant lots, hidden gardens, large oak trees in the park, a small brook running under the highway or a marsh behind the baseball field. Though the modern American kid may not have easy access to wilderness there is never a shortage of wild places to explore, and even in these tiny patches there are authentic learning experiences to be had.

The second ingredient kids need to develop an environmental ethic is a caring mentor. Summer time finds a glut of passionate and experienced teachers with time available to keep kids engaged, safe, and hook them on the environment for life. Sumer camp is a professional mainstay for many environmental educators and while camp may be an economic luxury for some families there are many organizations committed to giving urban youth access to the camp experience. It is paramount that summer programs in the city include environmental education in their mission.

Though summer vacation and all its modern implications is a challenge for some children, the time spent away from the classroom with feet in the sand, hands in the water, a little adult guidance and some small patch of green can unlock that delicate thing, that power of place. It is the stuff of poets and transcendentalists, quantified by urban planners, inked by writers and artists. It is that thing that environmental educators are acutely aware of: that being in a wild place, looking for little changes, observing life, turning rocks, and floating leaf boats. These are the tiny moments that create a life long love of nature and the environment and it all can happen during a summer in the city.

Alex Dunn is a Museum Educator at the EcoTarium and writes the blog the Daily Bird New England