This post graciously provided by my friend, Kirk Burtch. He gets the praise or the blame, depending on how you receive it. :) Thanks Kirk!

Say it ain’t so. Now I am being told all my fond memories of days spent as a youth playing in and around the lake on lazy summer days stunted my intellectual growth. The theory goes that students from all economic levels learn on the average the same during the school year. But only the wealthy students whose parents provide special opportunities for learning over the summer advance during that period. This explains the ‘achievement gap’ between the disadvantaged and the more privileged students. Thus, the problem in the United States is not the quality of our schools but rather summer vacations. It seems during those summer days I lost focus and rather than advancing I may have been forgetting some of what I had learned the year before. The solution Gladwell offers is to keep the kids in school longer and teach them the work ethic Asian children learn in the rice paddies. In such cultures the children and their parents work throughout the year and by necessity must pay close attention to detail.

Another way to state this proposition is the more you stay focused on the task at hand and the more you avoid spending time away from your pursuit, the more successful you are in obtaining your goal. Whether this option would solve the problems in American schools is debatable but it is a good reminder for Christians.

As Christians, our goal is to be sanctified, to grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior, to be more like Jesus. How do we do this? Peter tells us that if we are not growing in this way, we are so nearsighted we are blind having forgotten we were cleansed from our former sins. 2 Pet 1 3-11 But how do we keep from forgetting? John tells us we are to continually abide in Christ. Jn 15:4 That means we are to continue in a daily, personal relationship with Jesus, characterized by trust, prayer, obedience, and joy. But how easy it is to take a ‘summer vacation’ from our abiding in him and instead rejoice in the things of this world. As with the disadvantaged students, these vacations can keep us from being successful. They stunt our growth, causing us to become blind, and keep us from obtaining our goal. They may provide fleeting pleasure but keep us from real joy.

Tags: book discussion, Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers, summer vacations