The city of New York has decided children enrolled in its public schools can do without snow days. NYC’s Department of Education decreed it will be replacing those winsome days of benumbing fun with interminable hours spent in front of a Chromebook. Children will be granted the new joy of staring out the window at the enticing snowfall while working from home like corporate drones in miniature.
Timothy Nerozzi reports for Fox News:
According to New York law, students must attend a minimum of 180 days in school per year. Officials believe the shift from cancelations to remote learning will provide more opportunities for students to meet the quota.
“Over the years, the DOE introduced additional holiday observances as part of the school calendar, and has contractual obligations which limit the number of possible school days,” the city’s Department of Education said in a statement.
The department continued, “The pandemic has also created the ability to switch seamlessly to remote learning, and DOE central and schools have distributed hundreds of thousands of devices to ensure that learning can continue remotely during school closures.”
Children should have snow days. The frabjous wonder of flashing awake, taking a moment to pray while raising the blinds to assess the snowfall, and then sprinting to the radio to hear one’s school announced (or these days scrolling down a web page to see if it’s listed) is one that no kid should go without. The snow arrives at random to bestow such emancipation — a lesson that each day has the capacity for joyous upheaval. Snow days are an unexpected gift of a day dedicated to play amid the stupefying gray days of winter.
Chesterton puts it this way:
The fascination of children lies in this: that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is put again upon its trial. As we walk the streets and see below us those delightful bulbous heads . . . we ought always primarily to remember that within each of these heads there is [a] new universe, as new as it was on the seventh day of creation. In each of those orbs there is a new system of stars, new grass, new cities, a new sea.
Are we to show our children a world of drudgery even on the most heavenly days, when the world is stilled by God’s chill bounty? Shall we say, “Work, child. The world should not stop for good things; don’t acknowledge them.” It’s perverse.
The education administrators cite “contractual obligations” and “additional holiday observances” for shuttering snow days. Now holidays are lovely things, but a quick glance through the roster of observed holidays, breaks, and recesses reveals a substantial layer of fat in the calendar. Furthermore, negotiations are under way with the city’s unions. Cannot the city mandate snow days be built into the calendar with these new contracts? Of course they can, and they should.
The adult who considers snow days an impediment to education and cannot conceive of frolicking’s qualitative value should be far removed from decision-making of any kind. As Roald Dahl put it, “A little nonsense now and then, is relished by the wisest men.” One wonders if these adults were ever children, or instead spontaneously came into being full grown with a four-foot-long, three-quarter-inch-diameter red-oak dowel lodged in their intestinal tract.
Let the kids build a snowman, because soon enough they’ll be stuck paying for our sins of indiscriminate spending. May they show us more charity than we have granted them the past three years.