Future your education

All-day schools

 

Since the mid 1940s, most American children have spent approximately 6.5 hours per day at school (from 8 to 2.30). Considering that weekends are free and vacations are long, children spend approximately 20% of their waking hours per year at school.

Personally I enjoyed that my mum cared for me after school. I could always tell her about my experiences and fears. She helped me to do my homework and to improve my language skills.

I was in a privileged position, but those, whose parents were not at home, because they had to work and those, whose parents did not speak German, saw the disadvantages of an unequal world.

Longer school days are not only beneficial for children, but for a society as a whole.

Crime rates and alcohol abuse could be reduced, if teenagers spend more time at schools, were they feel welcomed and secure. Spending more time with their pupils also gives teachers the opportunity to find out, where individual strengths and weaknesses lie and to respond adequately to children with special needs.

Making kids see schools as a place where they are supported, where their success is cherished and where they can grow, is an ambitious aim, which is far more likely to achieve, if children are given the possibility to gain self-confidence in sports, drama groups or musical education in the afternoon. At the moment, most leisure activities are reserved for an elite that can afford private lessons.

This educational model could be one more step into a world, where a role model with mothers staying at home in order to care for their children in the afternoon, is part of the history.

According to researches from Harvard Business school, in America, daughters of working mothers earned 23% more than their peers who were raised by stay-at-home mothers, while sons of working moms spent seven and a half more hours a week on childcare and 25 more minutes on housework.

There still is a long way to go and cost-intensive childcare is probably not the first investment governments are willing to make considering the high expenditures walking along with the maintenance of refugees, that are seeking shelter especially in northern European countries.

Savings at the expense of unequally treated children will put countries sooner or later in a dangerous situation, that is why I come to the conclusion that all-day schools must be implemented urgently.