School in the Winter?

An article by Jerry Lembcke on telegram.com discusses how unnatural our normal life in the winter is. As the argument starts out Limbcke describes a beautiful winter morning that the French Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau must have experienced while writing some of his greatest works. The morning is clear, cold, and most of all white. The whole earth appears to be blanketed by a thick layer of snow, but above all else there is quiet. Lembcke goes on to describe the scene outside of his apartment after a snow storm: “From my window I watch a front-end loader clear the snow left by the recent blizzard from our parking lot, its engine growling, its bucket clanging against the dump truck. In an hour the snow will be gone so that I and other drivers can get our cars on the road.” Lembcke has beautifully contrasted this harsh scene with the winter wonderland that he described earlier. This is an excelent way to make us think on how unnatural our winter activities are, going about life the same way we would if it were 75° outside. Lembcke then uses contrast again by comparing this behavior to the behavior of animals: who either move, hibernate or slow way down during the cold winter months. At this point he really has us wondering why we do what we do during the winter…and Lembcke anticipates this.  “We truck in fuel for machines to uncover our snow-covered cars that will get us onto streets and roads cleared by whole caravans of snowplows burning millions of gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel, all to get us to schools and workplaces artificially heated and lighted by oil and coal moved vast distances by trucks, trains, and pumps. At day’s end, we return to homes unnaturally heated and lighted by more fuel, where we eat food moved to us from where it was grown, hundreds of miles away.” Lembcke’s argument is that we need to start putting ourselves at an inconveinience in order to give nature a chance to recover from the harsyh abuse that we have put onto it. This can be done in a number of ways he says, and one of these is rethinking the schoolyear. How could this help the environment? many, including myself pondered this. The answer, like many from this piece, is simple. Fuel. Schools spend outrageous amounts of money on heating during the winter, and while school during the summer could prevent heating costs, would it solve the real problem?