Why is summer a time of leisure or work rather than schooling for most students in the United States today? Kenneth Gold offers a fascinating and complex account of the history of summer education that rejects the pervasive myth that summer vacation is a natural vestige of agrarian America and highlights an historic tension over the presence and absence of summer education in American public schools. School's In unravels the ideologies and politics surrounding the nineteenth-century demise of summer terms and the social concerns and conditions that gave rise to twentieth-century summer schools whose remedial features remain familiar today.