In 1867, something called the Department of Education was formed in the United States, establishing the notion that providing children with an education is a universally good idea. But in the century and a half since then, it seems we’ve managed to take the 15 years of children’s lives that should be the most fun, carefree, inquisitive, and experimental and turn them into a period filled with stress and a neurotic sense of failure.

The New York Times ran a devastating story this weekend about a sophomore at Hamilton College who hanged himself because he was flunking three out of four classes and “felt like a failure.” Suicide is the second-leading cause of death, after accidents, among college students in the U.S. Nearly one in three teenagers told the American Psychological Association that stress drove them to sadness or depression. And that their single biggest source of stress was school. The Washington Post reported on Monday that doctors increasingly see children in early elementary school suffering from migraine headaches and ulcers, which many psychologists see as a clear connection to performance pressure.

Even so, parents and schoolteachers continue to feed their kids byzantine notions like “hard work pays off.” And what is the big payoff? Acceptance to an elite institution of higher education — the one achievement upon which a young person’s entire worth seems to hinge. 

Education in the United States has become a mishmash of well-meaning intentions and competing objectives. Add to the mix some ruthless competition, snobbery, fickle judgments, crushed confidence, government meddling, bureaucracy, and social engineering.

Globally, the U.S. ranks fifth in spending per student, but most recently in a math analysis, it placed 26th out of the 34 countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, alongside the Slovak Republic, Lithuania, and Hungary. Additionally, only 29 percent of Americans say they believe our education system is above average. 

If you want to see the absolute proof that we’ve got it all wrong, then have a look at how Finland does education. 

In a country of about five million that doesn’t introduce its children to formal schooling until the age of 7, its education system has become a byword for excellence. Students don’t see a standardized test until they’re 16. Finnish teachers are given a great deal of responsibility and are allowed unfettered flexibility in what and how they teach. Performance isn’t observed and graded. Instead, annual development discussions with school leaders provide feedback, and teachers make their own assessments of their strengths and weaknesses. 

Above all, you get a sense of a mature education system, where problems can be anticipated, not merely reacted to. Recently, Finland’s math standards slipped to 12th in the world and educators sent out a directive to schools to “put more joy back in the classroom.” Education in Finland is not seen as a government issue but as a societal one. And none of it is exactly based on rocket science.

But here in America, our multibillion-dollar education business says that it’s acting in the children’s best interests. That all the tweaking they do to standards and testing and college entrance exams will make children happier. 

Forget it. Happiness went out the window in second grade. After that, it’s just one long, grisly “Hunger Games”-like competition where the weak and the kind, the quixotic, the dreamers, the passionately weird, and the late bloomers get left behind at the end of each round. Only the blinkered overachievers, the wunderkinds, and the driven will prevail at the bitter end.

Hillary Clinton once said that it took a village to raise a child. Oh my God. If only. If only all it took was some happy, higgledy-piggledy, picturesque village with smock-wearing aunties to lend a hand. But no sleepy, chicken potpie-baking hamlet is going to help your kid through the angst of high school, the mania of college admissions, and ultimately to that one university that will lead to a life worth living.

Oh no, we need far more than a village. We need au pairs who speak Mandarin and Latin, concert pianist nannies, tutors, counselors, and professional athletes with torn A.C.L.s to teach hand-eye coordination. We must have voice coaches and fencing instructors, essay consultants, and psychiatrists to write a chit for extra time on exams. There have to be summer camps for creative writing, test prepping, and mock interviews. We need vacations, not to sunbathe and unwind, but to build a school in a third world country.

Ezra Pound was on to all of this 80 years ago when he said, “Real education must be limited to [those] who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheepherding.”

And the worst part is, no one out there is smart enough to figure out how to fix it.

Judy D’Mello is The Star’s education reporter.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a psychological need to set the household to rights before doing much of anything else in the morning. First I potter around the bedroom, putting a book left willy-nilly on the bedside table back in its place or picking up socks I tossed about at bedtime. Next comes the kitchen, tidying away spices neglected after dinner or pots and pans scrubbed and left to dry. I think I am a morning potterer because I always pre-emptively imagine what the house will look like should company drop by, even if no one is expected but family.

Birdwatching comes next on my pleasant morning rounds. I’m not an expert, by any means, but no matter: I keep two feeders outside the sun porch windows and an eye on whatever winged creature shows up. Recently, a family member helped me identify a few migrating species as well as the songs of the chickadees and the red-wing blackbirds. I refill the feeder and stand and watch the woodpeckers and blue jays, even before coffee, before brushing my teeth.

These first things I do in the morning aren’t chores but pleasurable rituals, and it’s true in all weather. I can attest that there’s something to be said for taking the time to listen to the wind or to watch snow fall in winter.

On spring mornings like these, however, after the bedroom and the pots and pans and the birds, I habitually check the vases I like to keep filled, eliminating any flowers that no longer look good and rearranging the bouquets.

Four varieties of narcissus came up in the yard this year, and, after they were just about gone, I gathered more wherever I could. The dog, Sweet Pea, and I haven’t had to go very far on our morning walks before we find a few daffodils that call out to be collected.

One day recently Sweet Pea and I were out for a stroll when we casually meandered into a neighbor’s backyard and the neighbor suddenly appeared. “What are you doing?” she called out, sounding annoyed. “Stealing daffodils,” I confessed, although saying so was gilding the lily, so to speak. It was obvious what we were doing. Even Sweet Pea looked shamefaced.

I then mumbled something irrelevant about this being a second-home community and my having thought that if no one was in residence, taking advantage of gorgeous daffodils was fair game. But, of course, someone clearly was in residence. Sorry, neighbor!

Lord knows, we are lucky to live in a place where nature remains bountiful, where it’s almost impossible not to enjoy the arrival of new growth. Even invasive plants can be beautiful, like the wild, wanton spread of lesser celandine that Larry Penny identified for me last week.

 A perfect match for the yard’s dandelions — a bright, buttercup yellow —lesser celandine (or ranunculus ficaria), mixed in with cornflower-blue flowers of several sizes that I don’t know the name of, has for several decades given our front lawn more the appearance of a meadow in May than a suburban lawn. We like the meadow effect, even if it’s not everyone’s taste. The fact that dog-walking neighbors are unlikely to stop by to help themselves to our wildflower weeds is a bonus, I suppose, but if they did they’d be welcome.

After a persistently cold winter, the shadbush has at last bloomed. Cloudlike sprays of white flowers are rising briefly here and there on Napeague like fireworks and fading away as quickly, as their gentle petals drop and green leaves unfurl where the sparks had just been.

Spring does not linger on the edge of Gardiner’s Bay. Trees slumber for months, and then get on with their business. There is pollen to release. Fruit must be set. By the Fourth of July, the shadbush’s small, hard green berries will hide among the greenery.

In high summer, the catbirds will take up residence outside my kitchen window to gorge, leaving the small trees’ plans for a new generation in modest purple piles under their perches or, less optimistically, on the hood of my truck.

But in the last couple of years something has gotten hold of the shadbush. There are dead stands along the edges of the swamps and low places, their white-gray bones leaning against neighbors like gravestones knocked over by vandals.

Several speculative, conflicting causes may be responsible for the shadbush’s sudden demise: disease, fungus, or maybe sea-level rise altering conditions in the ground. Time, too, seems a likely suspect. 

In old photographs, there is very little tall vegetation along the southerly shore of the bay. I have long wondered why. Did the 1938 Hurricane wipe all of it away, perhaps? If so, could the shadbushes that began to rise anew as World War II raged now be beginning to drop away, like those veterans?

I worry, too, that their replacements will have a tough time of it, between a changing climate and the predations of deer on the saplings. For now, though, the show goes on — sparks and the end of darkness — each May along the roadsides and by the edges of the swamps.

This would be the time of year I’d rub neat’s-foot oil into my mitt, inhale the heady smell, and put in a ball and fasten it with a stiff rubber band.

The mitt now is, as I am, shriveled and stiff, and while there’s little left to crow about, I still sing in the spring.

What’s not to like? Well, the catkins for one, and the pollen for two, and the ticks, but, all things considered, it’s nice to be carried along by the urgency of the season.

You can’t help but be hopeful in the spring. It’s in the natural order of things, building up to the madness of summer (at least out here), the wistfulness of fall (“. . . And gathering swallows twitter in the skies”), and the despair of winter (after the Super Bowl’s been played) before hope leafs out again.

I asked Mary why our surroundings always seem to stand out more in the spring. Was it the light, the air? All of a sudden the tracery of the tree limbs is more evident, and you see in the woods houses you hadn’t seen in the winter. She said that it was because everything was alive.

“Are the birds’ songs all about mating?” I asked her as we were strolling in Maidstone Park  this morning. “Is it their way of saying, ‘Haven’t we met before. . . ? Do you come here often?’ ”

It was low tide, with few signs of minnows, which worried Mary, until she saw some encouraging ripples. The beachscape was gray-green, and the air was still, aside from earth movers churning up the dirt on the infield of the Little League diamond up above, preparing for the season. 

“Ross Gload used to hit home runs into those trees when he was a Little Leaguer,” I said as we cut across right field, a trifle wistfully, wondering for a moment when championship teams would flourish here again — an untimely wish, though, given the ripening beauty that is embracing us.

Now that I’m back traveling the South Fork daily, I’ve come to one very simple realization: The cellphone service out here is really not so great.

I don’t mean to return and immediately start complaining — those who know me best, please refrain from a snarky laugh. I am really quite happy to be back at The East Hampton Star, which has become my home away from home in my affiliation with the paper, which dates back 17 years. I missed East Hampton, the people, the ocean, and so much more. 

The commute from our home in Flanders is, of course, something I did not miss when I was working on the North Fork. The drive is scenic. There is something to be said for passing the farm fields and giving a wave to the farmer up on the tractor. I break up the drive with stops along the way, whether it’s my favorite coffee spot or my firehouse in Bridgehampton. Coming to work in a historic building right on Main Street, walking distance to the village and next door to the library, has a certain charm. 

But, what’s with the cell service? Is it me, or has it gotten worse? I have AT&T, but I’m curious if those with Verizon or T-Mobile are faring any better. What’s it going to be like in the summer when the crowds arrive? 

I’m one of those people who talks so much on the phone for work that when it comes to my friends and family, I’d rather they text. However, my drive — which can sometimes last more than an hour — is the one time I don’t mind the conversation. I have Bluetooth in my car, so don’t worry, I’m hands-free. 

I’ve come to know the bad spots and dead zones well. On my commute west, service is worst by far around CVS and the Red Horse Market in East Hampton Village. No one can hear me pretty much until I get to Wainscott. Sagaponack used to be worse, but appears to have improved. Then, by the Bridgehampton School, the signal strength trails off again, only to improve in downtown Bridgehampton and go out again just as you pass the Bridgehampton Commons. As you get into Water Mill, the service begs off yet again, until you come out of the curve and get near the Parrish Art Museum. The conversation can continue fine pretty much until you hit P.C. Richard & Son, and then it’s trouble pretty much all the way to Sunrise. 

Don’t get me started on the reception on Flanders Road. 

I’m not going to pretend to understand the ins and outs of cell reception, but it’s 2018. Shouldn’t we be able to make a call and keep the call as we travel a major route? 

If I’m asking too much, feel free to tell me. But I do wonder if people in these dead spots have ever experienced issues dialing 911 in an emergency. As someone who traverses this route several times a week, that has me thinking. 

I do suppose it could all be worse. I could be traveling to work underground in a hot subway with nothing pretty to look at out my window when the call drops. 

On second thought, just text me after all. I’ll read it later. 

Taylor K. Vecsey is The Star’s deputy managing editor.

For the better part of the school year, when I was in seventh grade, I went to my Great Aunt Elizabeth’s house for lunch. Uncle Chiel, a formidable presence, had lunch at the same time, and I would watch with shock and awe as he devoured an assortment of strange meats and offals like calves brains. I always was served scrambled eggs and white-bread toast with grape jelly.

My aunt, my maternal grandfather’s sister, was a simple woman with a calm demeanor and severely pulled-back black hair. Her English name may have been an inapt translation of Laika, the name we called her. (I just Googled “Laika” and learned that it was the name of a Soviet space dog who was the first animal to orbit the Earth. Oh, well, I loved my Tante Laika.)

There were always plenty of fresh eggs to be had when I was a child, although the chicken coups on the family farm had been turned into cabins for summer renters. Today, as it turns out, more than one of my relatives hereabouts keep laying hens. It therefore wasn’t a total surprise when I came home the other day to find three light-brown eggs, which must have been laid that morning, in a plastic container on the kitchen table. That day I ate scrambled eggs for lunch, along with delicious Breadzilla sourdough and blueberry jam. The bread, I must admit, was a step up from my seventh-grade usual.

No butter was used for scrambling eggs at my Tante Laika’s house, and I can’t help but wonder if she used chicken fat while preparing meats for her husband. I could experiment with that some day, I suppose, but it doesn’t sound promising: schmaltz and calves brains? Schmaltz and beef tongue? On second thought, no.

The first time I ate bacon and eggs, I was having lunch with a cousin whose parents, unlike mine, had long since given up keeping kosher. Uncle Sid was totally Americanized and known for grilling steaks. As we sat down to eat that morning, my cousin, knowing my family kept kosher and realizing that her mother, my Aunt Kate, was making bacon and eggs, went into the kitchen to warn, in a loud whisper, that it would be a mistake to serve me bacon. I’ve never forgotten what Aunt Kate said: “Just tell her it’s fish.” Honestly, that’s what she said! I was young and I guess she thought I would believe anything.

I pretended not to have heard, and it was anarchy from then on out. How can you go back, once you’ve tasted bacon?

At Douglass College, in New Brunswick, N.J., I had a part-time job in a restaurant frequented by Johnson and Johnson factory employees who went to work at dawn and liked boiled beef and potatoes for lunch, before noon. How antediluvian that sounds today. Who eats boiled meat, unless it is St. Patrick’s Day? Lunch nowadays is a far cry from scrambled eggs, with or without bacon; we tend to eat things that once were unusual but are now readily available. Sushi, parsnips, bulghur, hummus, feta, Moroccan tagines. . . . 

However, I am told that the family hens have been laying like little maniacs, and if relatives are going to make a habit out of dropping off freshly laid eggs, I am going to go back to scrambling more often. Maybe I’ll eat them with green-chili sauce, or stewed tomatoes and peppers, though, instead of grape jelly.

Surfing out at Montauk Point last week, I was startled when a seal, make that a really, really big seal, popped its bulbous head out of the water just a few feet from where I sat straddling my board. It was a chilly, windy day, with few birds around and even fewer other surfers. I felt alone, and, had the seal been amorous or angry, there was little around other than me for it to take out its urges upon.

Not that that was likely to happen. Despite the general increase in the numbers of seals hereabout, I have never heard of one attacking a surfer or swimmer, or even getting closer than a board’s length away. The closest story I have heard was from a Montauk local who collided with one while on a stand-up board some time ago. He and the seal kind of took to the air simultaneously. Still, it is hard to forget when you sit out there alone in the fog that nice, plump seals are favored by sharks, like the great whites now thought to maintain a breeding ground just off our shore.

Something is happening out there in the water, that’s for sure. A couple of days after Mr. Big Head and I had our stare-down at the Point, I saw several smaller seals on the south side and gulls picking up halves and heads of fish, presumably scraps from the seals’ morning meal. 

And the woods are busy, too. Over in Bridgehampton the other day on a back road, I noticed a flock of turkeys on a rise getting busy, or so they hoped. As the females picked about indifferently, the large males puffed and displayed, seeking their affection. I felt sorry for a puny male off by himself a distance away on a gravel driveway, taking his chances with his tail feathers extended on the periphery.

For two mornings this week, a big whitetail doe has been in the yard when I let out the dogs. It has been jumping our modest fence to graze on the so-far uncut grass. The dogs enjoy the racket as the deer crashes through the swamp, presumably leaping away to safety. 

Seals sealing, birds birding, deer deering. Spring has been like that. Who knows what summer will bring.

Spring began for me over the weekend of April 21 and 22. The weather was the best it’s been in six months, it seemed, and athletic things, all of a sudden, abounded — the Katy’s Courage 5K in Sag Harbor, baseball, youth lacrosse, and youth soccer games at East Hampton High School, and, at the Pantigo fields, Little League’s opening ceremonies — all in one day.

Mary and I and O’en, our white golden, walked the 5K, though we cheated, cutting off a bothersome half-mile spur along Glover Street, where Andy Neidnig used to live, on our way to the finish line. 

I confessed to Jim Stewart, who took it in stride.

The winter, as everyone here knows, extended well through March and at least through the first half of April. I was always wondering, from about mid-February on, where my next story would be coming from. 

Newsday’s high school sportswriter suggested that Long Island not begin the spring sports season until it was really spring (not that we’ve ever had a spring), and, to accommodate that change, that Long Island’s spring championship teams forgo the state playoffs. 

But that would just tax even further my imaginative dexterity, I told Mary.

And now, just as I’ve begun to feel secure story-wise, I’m beginning nevertheless to sense the ominous tremors that precede the tsunami we call summer. 

There’s that golf tournament in Southampton, for one. The last time, I had to buy a periscope made by the Mickelsons to view the final round. My brother-in-law says I should stay home on Sunday and watch it on TV. Nothing like not being there. 

And then there’s the Class . . . Class . . . Classic, which, of course, keeps me jumping. I know nothing about golf, and less than nothing about horses. Which is why I’ve always depended on the kindness of my sources.

Still, it’s spring, and the ball Dylan Thomas threw while playing in the park / has not yet reached the ground. 

As the season changes from the calm quiet of winter to the raucous bustle of spring, the nature preserve where I live is teeming with new life. 

Bluebirds and tree swallows are moving into the nest boxes spread around the meadows of Mashomack. Everywhere robins pull worms from the earth. Shockingly red cardinals flaunt their fresh feathers, bright scarlet with new growth. Two weeks ago, a flutter of royal blue and teal caught my eye on the morning drive. At least half a dozen richly colored little birds were flitting from ground to branch — indigo buntings, my first-ever sighting. 

The ospreys have been back for a month and are staking out their nesting sites. Peering through a scope at the massive bald eagle nest, we’ve spotted at least one fuzzy gray hatchling. A bundle of fluff that pokes its head up from among the sticks now and then, it would be easy to miss if you weren’t patient enough to wait and watch. 

Fox kits caught trotting down the driveway stop to take a look at an approaching car, still too young to know better. While out at night two weeks ago to watch a team from the D.E.C. netting bats in the woods, we came across the pelt of a muskrat that a mother fox must have delivered to her young. It was a neat rectangle, furry on one side and picked clean on the other. A kit surprised by the beam of our headlamps had dropped it. 

In the ponds and kettleholes, the spring peepers are screaming. The chorus from each pond is a little different. As night falls, it becomes a symphony, reaching a crescendo, dying back, intensifying again. The populations of the ponds seem to be competing against one another. How is it these creatures no bigger than an inch can make such a wonderful, riotous racket? 

When we first moved to Mashomack, I described myself as a reluctant naturalist. Not true, exactly, but I wasn’t sure I would like being in such an isolated spot after being five minutes from everything for so long. I thought it would be too quiet. It is sometimes, but in the absence of all that human influence, the natural world speaks more loudly and clearly. 

I pay attention to the comings and goings of the red-tailed hawks, the point in the night when the peepers pipe down, the hour when the egrets head to their favorite tree, the kind of morning light that the bluebirds seem to appreciate. All of these things are rich with character. 

In every pocket of the preserve a different story unfolds and changes with the season. We are part of it, but nature is in charge.

Carissa Katz, The Star’s managing editor, is living at the Nature Conservancy’s Mashomack Preserve on Shelter Island, where her husband is the preserve director.

Two small daffodils forced themselves out in the greensward between the sidewalk and a picket fence in front of an old East Hampton house on Main Street about a week ago, and I admire them as I pass by. 

The house never seems occupied, and the daffodils have come by chance, which makes me realize that I admire come-by-chance, ostensibly tough blooms more than cultivated ones, scattered or in bunches. I admit to being pleased that there are several kinds of narcissi now in bloom in my yard, and enough to cut and bring indoors. But I enjoy those that have popped up here and there without help (except perhaps from the weather) even more, including some on the lane in front of the house.

Children aren’t daffodils, but I nevertheless think my inclination where flowers are concerned somehow translates into a metaphor for how I feel about children who have been separated from their parents while being processed at Homeland Security stations along the southwest border. A wall, a fence, a flower bloom­ing where it has been told it shouldn’t . . .

According to The New York Times, officials recently confirmed that about 700 migrant children have been taken away from their parents at the border since October, and that more than 100 of those children were less than 4 years old. Four years old!

The Department of Homeland Security is quoted as saying that families are “not separated to deter illegal immigration” but to “protect the best interests of minor children.” As far as I am concerned, this is not just double talk from the Trump administration, but a dark, dangerous doublespeak that is meant to obscure the truth of a policy that is horrifying and inhumane. Perhaps we would best call it doublethink, to borrow a word from Orwell’s dystopian book “1984.”

Taken from their families, these children will have to be tough to survive. Daffodils don’t need much more than air, sunshine, and rain, but children must be fed, clothed, loved, and nurtured.

At one point, the Trump administration let it be known that it was actually considering taking children away from their parents as a means of deterring migrants from crossing our southern border. I ask: Could our leaders disgrace themselves — and our country, and us, the citizens — more by even considering such a cruel policy toward children?

The Trump administration’s lack of compassion for the well-being and dignity of human beings is a reflection of Mr. Trump’s own narcissism, and this degrading state of affairs should by now be painfully evident to all Americans, even those who have always in good faith supported the Grand Old Party. 

If ever there was a moment for the scales to fall from the eyes of people of integrity who made the mistake of voting for Mr. Trump, is this not it?