AFAIK French policy was driven by mothers that want to continue working. Most jobs and careers just aren't possible to do with halved working hours even if it was paid well.
That's the European approach that children belong to whole community not only their parents and the authority and the burden is shared. I don't get why are you so hell bent on having exclusive authority over your child?
> Most jobs and careers just aren't possible to do with halved working hours even if it was paid well.
Nah. That’s what people used to say abou WFH too. All this is purely due to capricious employers and institutions, not because of some natural law. If companies had their way, we’d be working 80h/week. That’s true for both low paying and high paying jobs.
> Most jobs and careers just aren't possible to do with halved working hours
I just don't buy this; it feels like a lack of imagination. Sure, today, very few firms that traditionally employ full-time, salaried employees would even consider the idea of hiring twice as many half-time workers, but there's no inherent reason why it couldn't work.
Certainly, there are hurdles: some per-employee costs are fixed regardless of how many hours they work. But this is just an argument to fix them (because they're stupid in general), not to avoid the situation. Most part-time and contract workers in the US don't get benefits like health insurance and retirement plans. But this is an argument to fix those broken programs, not throw our hands up and claim the status quo is the only option.
Corporate profits and executive pay growth is generally far outstripping the wages paid to mid- and low-level employees. There's no reason why most companies can't pay their employees more equitably, and stop with all the pay inequality garbage.
> That's the European approach that children belong to whole community not only their parents and the authority and the burden is shared. I don't get why are you so hell bent on having exclusive authority over your child?
I'm not a parent, but childhood education these days seems more about pushing government propaganda and training kids to be obedient little employees (not to mention providing much-needed free day-care for parents), than about nurturing creativity and curiosity, and giving kids the tools they need to be productive, yet critical-thinking, independent people. I look at stories of 12-year-old kids getting arrested at school for asinine reasons[0] and wonder what the hell is happening.
I don't think people need "exclusive authority" over their children in general, but I do think the current state of public (and even private, in many cases) education could easily drive parents to not want their kids to be a part of it.
germany has made it a law that allows every employee to reduce their working hours to 20/week (with equivalent reduced pay), it's just a matter of people making use of it.
EDIT: apparently any kind of reduction is possible (even 2 hours per week) but the reduction needs to be sensible and the employer needs to agree. if they don't you can sue, and if the judges decide that your requested reduction is reasonable they must comply (i guess that means, you can ask for 2 hours a week and get it if the employer agrees, but if the employer doesn't agree you probably won't convince a judge either)
mothers wanting to send their children to kindergarten does not translate into needing to make it mandatory to do so. a better response would have been to make it a legal right (but not an obligation) combined with the necessary financial support or offer of government paid kindergarten spaces. the latter is lacking in germany for example.
No one has authority over the children beyond their parents and who their parents trust at church or mosque or synagogue or temple after many decades of trusting them in public and in the community and in interactions with each other. Trying to subvert this process by leveraging state-sponsored compulsory separation at 3 years old between babe and mother is nonsense. The more this small handful of wealthy sophists think they deserve authority over a child or have authority over a child's education, insofar as the parents are not guilty of deprivation or harm per reasonable & already universal controls that exist for these things, the more there will be significant backlash against these types of ideas.
Communities don't share the burden except to the extent that the parents need it and want it and share access to their household with members of their chosen communities and faiths. That is how it works in the entire massive United States and other Western Democracies, barring these irresponsible western European countries that seem to be possessed by increasingly idiotic ideas on how much control they want over our kids but how little responsibility they will show on serious urgent matters like nuclear reactor construction and adequate defense spending. The French should be absolutely ashamed and should repent.
When a state tries a state-sponsored approach to compulsively being responsible for teaching children with a monopoly on violence, especially contrary to what the parents may want to teach their child, that becomes a cause for jihad.
The state has some minor say over laws around children when tax money is being used to supplement the costs of raising a child.
Obviously at the end of the day most of a child's upbringing is the parents' prerogative but at the same time if people want to pull the "it takes a village" bs, as a gay man who will not have children (and not use any of the resources that tax dollars goes into) I believe that certain things like a child's education _should_ be managed by the government.
If the village does not have a say in village matters, then it makes me wonder why the hell everyone was allowed a say when it came to things like gay marriage, etc.
School teacher - easy; Lawyer - doable; Doctor - already done; Auto mechanic - no problem; Bank teller - easy; Construction worker...
Ok. I can't come up with any. I'm sure there must be some, but they don't come to mind. Most people work the number of hours it takes to earn the standard of living they accept. Work is never done. There's always more to do. That is never the question.
> That's the European approach that children belong to whole community not only their parents and the authority and the burden is shared. I don't get why are you so hell bent on having exclusive authority over your child?
I suspect you're trolling, but in case you're not:
As a European, I do have a lot of community centric philosophy - but given the government (local and country) incompetence in virtually all matters of education and the universally awful opinion all teachers I know hold of the government and their interference and policies regarding education and child care - I do not think that wanting the best for your kids that you love and wanting to be able to raise them yourself with individual attention and perspective is really that strange.
If there are good schools, I have no problem with my kids going to them, as long as it doesn't interfere with their growth and education.
> That's the European approach that children belong to whole community (...). I don't get why are you so hell bent on having exclusive authority over your child?
That's the European approach that children belong to whole community not only their parents and the authority and the burden is shared. I don't get why are you so hell bent on having exclusive authority over your child?