From the industrial revolution onwards, the eight-hour work day was established – at least formally. A little earlier, a British industrialist, Robert Owen, who wanted to improve working conditions for his employees, emphasized balance in daily life by defining the ideal day as one divided into 8 hours of work 6 days a week, 8 hours of sleep and rest and 8 hours of fun. Later, the famous car manufacturer Henry Ford was the one who started to reduce the working days from 6 to 5 as he noticed that this way his employees were more productive and made fewer mistakes. Kudos to Henry for spotting this and implementing it.
After that, the years passed, labor rights and working conditions typically remained at eight hours, but always with a tendency to be violated, even in the context of a developed country, a civilized society. On the other hand, in recent years it has been discussed, especially in the most advanced countries, that the six-hour shift is probably preferable, since our brains cannot maintain the same levels of energy and productivity for eight consecutive hours. It is even worth noting that we reach the zenith of our brain productivity there just before noon and again in the afternoon, around 6:00 p.m. Of course, all this, beyond the expected deviations, concerns the healthy population[1] who has a stable everyday life with good sleep, proper nutrition and, well, I'll say this too even though I don't like it, exercise. It is a task, as you understand, to bring our brain to its maximum productivity, and of course it presupposes the fact that we like the work we do and that the conditions under which we work are favorable to we want to be productive. But that is another conversation.
I think by now we agree that to be well we need to sleep for an eight hour period and work for another eight hour period. I leave the last eight hours to commuting, sightseeing, packing, cooking, bathing, shopping, outside work, entertainment, and so on and so forth, and stop to open another chapter.
The child.
First, first, the child needs more hours of sleep. Research may differ, but none gives less than 9 hours a day to children and adolescents under 18 years of age. The children - ideally - have no obligations other than their school ones. So what they have to do is go to their school and cope as best they can. So let's take out paper and pencil and calculate the hours that our child "works", because it is about work. She does practice to cultivate and also acquire other, useful skills, to learn all that he will need as a complete adult to succeed in his "normal" life. (what "success" means in life is something very subjective and multi-dimensional. Once again, this is another conversation, which cannot be done now).
So ideally our child gets what we call general education. Ideally, it takes a lot more than general education that you can see here, but once again this is another conversation.
So if we simply calculate the hours that our child is at school, or is preparing for it, then we have reached, and we have exceeded the legal eight-hour period. But if we add the hours that he attends another extracurricular activity or does extra lessons outside of school, for which he will also have to prepare, we will see that our children probably work more than most of us. And what hurts the most is the fact that this does not happen in general, it happens in our country.
So instead of general education, children start a marathon race, from elementary school, not to cope with the demands of school but for 2.5 reasons. Firstly, to start gathering certified knowledge that will give them the formal qualifications to find a job in the future, secondly to progress faster and, without gaps, reach the high school, in the final stretch that is, for their final confrontation with the their future, the Panhellenic exams. The remaining half concerns the creative part or the sports part or both, which most children are involved with until high school, if they are lucky, if they have no gaps in their other obligations, and of course if the parents can financially to provide it to them.
You understand that all these are man hours, require concentration and a productive brain (see above). So when we burden our child, or our child asks to be burdened with extracurricular activities, we make the following strategic mistake. We take the responsibility of free universal education off the shoulders of the state and take it upon ourselves. We give it a friendly (or not so friendly) pat on the back and say "let it go, you don't know, I'll take care of it". Is the state stupid to insist? General Education should be all of the above though: and foreign languages and soft skills, and sports and music and visual arts and theater and many, many more. Instead, children are forced to go to school, but what they really want to learn, or what their parents really want them to learn, they learn elsewhere.
Me too elsewhere I work, so it doesn't suit me professionally, but why should this happen? Why do children have to work overtime, even from elementary school? Children need play, quality time with their parents, with themselves and with their peers in order to develop. The empty time of commuting to and from home is not enough. When children come home tired, all they can do is become passive receivers, watching TV, staring at tablets and mobile phones, they don't feel like talking or they do something else. So we get into a vicious circle, just like that scary circle that Jack got into Shine. Okay, Jack didn't make it into this circle because he went to school in Greece, but you get where I'm going.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
Although this phrase appeared somewhere in the 17The century, Stephen King and Jack Nickolson but also the scene with the typewriter gave it another, even darker dimension. In Greek we say "a lot of work eats the master", while in English the master is Jack and he gets boring, dull, no shine, from a lot of work. No matter what language you see it in, it's not good. It seems even worse when it comes to our child.
At this point, and very naturally, one of you will wonder in a tone – justifiably – sarcastically, if I am dumb, an alien or an idealist. I'm not stupid, however, I can't understand this effortless adaptability of the Greek to bad texts instead of trying to change the texts and from bad to now at least adequately if not well. I'm making a big deal, I know, but a conversation can bring action, while its absence leads to inaction and the perpetuation of a situation that has long been saturated and has the power to drive us and our children into moments of hazy daily madness. .
*Frontpage picture: Jack Nicholson / Jack Torrance – The Shining, 1980
[1] You can see how a healthy person is defined here.