Jun 21, 2013 4 min read

Excerpts from recent editorials in newspapers in the United States and abroad as compiled by the Associated Press:

We’ve honored the graduates. All the final grades are in. Another wonderful, challenging, learning-rich school year is finished; congratulations to all the students and educators who made it to summer.

Now, isn’t it about time everyone got back to class?

OK, that is an exaggeration. Everybody deserves a vacation – teachers and students, too. For students, though, the problem is that when a vacation comes all at once in the form of summer months off, all that knowledge they’ve spent time and effort to learn can evaporate like so much summer dew. In fact, there is mounting evidence that having summers off from school is bad for learning.

Why is this important? Ask any teacher: The first several weeks of the new school year are spent reviewing the stuff students learned the first time the previous year. The research shows that the things students are most likely to forget during the summer are math, spelling and other concrete tasks, as opposed to more conceptual lessons. But memorization of stuff like multiplication tables or grammar rules are part of what students need to learn. If they don’t use them, they lose them.

The point is that we shouldn’t think of year-round schooling as schooling with no breaks whatsoever. It is school with vacations reasonably and efficiently allocated.

Summer vacation came about in agrarian times when the break was needed so children could tend the farm. Those days are gone. Most working parents don’t have three months off to spend with their kids, and we don’t need summer vacation anymore – it’s not worth the costs to student learning.

Debate over helmet use by motorcycle riders continues, and won’t be settled soon. Most statistics indicate that wearing a helmet reduces your chance of being killed or injured (likely a lifelong head injury) by wearing a helmet while riding.

Nevertheless, state helmet laws have slowly been rolled back over the years. But a study conducted in Michigan shows why it’s a good idea to keep the laws. A Highway Loss Data Institute study found the average insurance payment on a motorcycle injury claim in Michigan was $5,410 in the two years before the law was changed. It jumped to $7,257, an increase of 34 percent, after the law was changed.

Bottom line: Those involved in motorcycle accidents and not wearing a helmet are likely to have higher medical bills. And that costs the rest of us in higher insurance premiums and in many cases, for care long after the accident.

Because of the nature of riding on a motorcycle, it makes sense to wear as much protection as possible. That includes a helmet for driver and passenger. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, helmets are 37 percent effective in preventing fatal injuries to motorcycle operators and 41 percent effective for passengers.

Because riding is a privilege, the state can enact mandatory helmet laws to lessen the financial burden on all of us. It’s not just common sense to wear a helmet, it makes financial sense as well.

If Americans preferred not to think about how much they have surrendered in the war on terror, they can’t avoid doing so now. They can’t make a phone call to their dentist or hairdresser without having their home or cellphone number secretly taken down by Washington, along with the other party’s number, the time of the call and its length. It’s that bad.

If Osama bin Laden were still alive he’d chalk up this surveillance gone wild as a coup for Al Qaeda. More than a decade after the 9/11 attack, it still has the United States living in fear and trading away freedoms for security. This is beginning to look like a war the U.S. is determined to lose, one way or another.

In effect, the U.S. government is asking its citizens (and people elsewhere who use the Internet) to trust it as it trolls through their private lives looking for bad actors. The sheer audacity of that demand speaks volumes about America’s unhealthy obsession with terror. It’s past time to move on.