In the late 70's, when I was a high school student, you went to summer school if you (a) had failed a class or (b) had absolutely nothing better to do. At my high school, (b) meant a choice of health and hygiene, taught by the football coach; driver's ed, taught by a short-tempered Algerian man with an uncertain command of English ("Fascinate your seat belts!"); introductory Spanish, taught by a blowsy recent divorcee who openly favored the boys; typing, taught by a woman with an undue interest in the paranormal; or "sociology," taught by a Weird Al Yankovic look-alike who wrote "Stay in touch -- all over my body!" in the girls' yearbooks. No one under the age of 15 even went to summer school -- they were off at day camp making lanyards or singing "There's a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea" or hanging upside down on the playground monkey bars or chasing the ice cream truck or something.

Summer school is different today, though: more rigorous, socially lustrous and, at the same time, more inclusive. Yes, there is lots of remediation, especially in urban areas like New York, where something like 60 percent of the city's students are supposed to be in class this summer. (Fifty percent of them are truant.) But if more students who would otherwise be held back a grade are now taking summer courses, so, too, are more driven, collegebound types whose parents hope for higher test scores and like the idea of structured, year-round learning. So are younger kids. This summer, school attendance is up all over the country.

Certainly, trying to make sure that kids have acquired math and reading skills before they're bumped to the next grade is all to the good. Certainly, there are many worse places to be -- starting with in front of the TV and ending with, oh, jail -- than school in the summer. And as summer-session boosters never tire of saying, the whole idea of a June-to-September break is arbitrary anyway: who says you can't go to school year-round now that our few remaining farmers no longer need their children's help in July and August?

Still, you have to wonder whether the new emphasis on spending more time in school -- the push for five-year high schools, the abandonment of recess and the prospect of year-round schooling are the other faces of this movement -- isn't partly an effort to substitute quantity for quality. Sort of like an all-you-can-eat buffet at a lousy restaurant.

You have to wonder too whether all the anxiety about lost skills and summer slumps -- Learning Takes No Vacation: How Parents Can Help Kids Overcome What Educators Call the Summer Slide" warns a headline in a recent parenting magazine -- isn't a little overwrought, and when it comes to middle-class families, a little misplaced. (A 1996 study showed the loss of reading skills over the summer months varied with socioeconomic status; children of poor families lost the most while those of middle-class families held steady or improved.) Perhaps affluent older parents imagine their children's brains are like theirs, finite spaces out of which 70's song lyrics must be moved to make room for new Web browsing skills, say, or George W. Bush's campaign promises. I hear my husband and me telling our 4-year-old what a good memory he has, and hear not just our positive reinforcement, but slightly jealous admiration. If we took the summer off, sure, we would forget a lot. But we are not 4, or 8, or 14.

Sometimes I think that what we are constructing, with all our talk about enrichment opportunities and skills maintenance and neural pathways, is an elaborate defense of what working parents must, after all, do, which is find someplace to put our kids while we are at work. Painstakingly, and in the most sophisticated terms, we translate necessity into virtue. What a relief to imagine our kids soaking up intellectual benefits that mere time with their parents could never provide! Except that sometimes when I look around my neighborhood this summer and try to find a playmate for my 4-year-old and realize that nearly all the probable candidates are in science camp or summer school, I think maybe we've gone a little far. When Judith Johnson, a former official at the Department of Education, notes in a recent radio interview that 11-year-olds may have to forfeit summer breaks because they will someday have to "compete" in the "international workplace" and that "all of the children around the world are seeing summer as another opportunity to learn," I wonder if we are being a bit too instrumental about our summers. It's true that summer vacation is a mere artifact of the days when farming played a bigger role in our economy, but by now it's a precious artifact, with an accretion of sweet associations and a sense of possibility all its own.

None of my favorite childhood memories of summer are about summer school. They're about the summer when my father was on the road and my mom discovered her own version of the 60's, put on her summer shifts and kicked off her shoes and walked for miles with my sister and me through unfamiliar residential neighborhoods, into the navy blue twilight. Or the summer my brothers taught me to body surf. Or the August afternoons when my cousins and I played endless games of Marco Polo in the backyard pool. I have no idea why any of this should stand out in my mind. They were uneventful summers, and I'm sure did nothing to raise my test scores. I suppose it's because some of those people are dead now, and some I hardly see, and the memory of their attentions is precious. I suppose it's because those times were so entirely without aim, without strategy, so unpractical in every way.