We used to just get snow days.

Then at some point, they made us make them up.

Now we have e-learning days.

We treat any threat to days in school like we are shortchanging our kids. As if free time is a dangerous disservice. Or at least an inconvenience we are forced to work around.

This is, of course, a one-sided economic view of education, which reduces childhood to a perpetual season of conditioning for future self-sustaining financial viability. As opposed to, you know, growing up.

We could make appeals here to the beauty of unplanned reprieves from school, the opportunity to lounge around, and the binging of daytime TV. All of which have a majestic part of my generation’s experience of childhood.

But that avoids the cruel part.

How we are commodifying children, their growth and education, and the very pattern of their lives is mechanized, inhuman, and gross. We are comparing our children, human beings, to cars on an assembly line. And treating any obstacles to their continued productivity like industrialist robber barons. We demand they fit into the ongoing system geared toward producing for us.

The idea that children “fall behind” because they’re out of school, measuring them against mythic industrialized visions of the ideal child is unconscionable to its core. The imposition of competition, against other students elsewhere or those so imagined is unnatural and unholy.

We aren’t bound to this methodology — it isn’t inevitable. We are greasing its gears and making it impossible to escape.

But let us also not blame educators for this mechanized turn. It is the misbegotten lovechild of those who condemn the educators themselves and those foolishly hoping to protect them.

Test scores, so beloved by hazers and technocrats alike, are the product, not actual people. Much like your data turns us into the sales product of the information age.

This isn’t an accident. The growth of our societal hatred of childhood is matched only by our loathing of living free of repressive obligations. To work and produce our own, personal life rather than benefit from common support for all people.

Our children are being given the false choice of giving in to the indoctrinating rat race or giving in to nihilism.

For heaven’s sake, let the kids have their snow days! Repeal the laws mandating so many school days (put into law by legislators who also seek to defund the public school system). Employ more teachers so our kids can have the attention they actually need. Give them more electives and less “college prep”. More recess, art, and civics.

Give our kids the real chance to learn. By climbing and exploring and negotiating! Let them create and strive and make! Our obsession with constant evaluation and attentiveness has built an assembly line of anxious, depressed, and suicidal teens.

We must stop thinking a never-ending barrage is the best way to learn—and the most important thing to learn. It is destroying the mental, emotional, and spiritual health of another generation!

Kids aren’t your engine of economic prosperity; child labor repackaged for the 21st century through STEM investment and wage devaluation.

Let kids be kids. Give them space to get bored, build snowmen, or make snow cones. And no, you don’t have to think about where the snow came from.