I do not buy into the work intensive life we want to foist on children. And I do not think that longer school years are necessarily better.
We should all, including children, work less, much less.
Joanna
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> Women in the USA do not enjoy paid maternity leaves common in almost
> all countries: "out of 168 nations in a Harvard University study last
> year, 163 had some form of paid maternity leave, leaving the United
> States in the company of Lesotho, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland" (The
> Associated Press, "U.S. Stands Apart from Other Nations on Maternity
> Leave," USA Today, 26 July 2006,
> <http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2005-07-26-maternity-leave_x.htm>).
>
> The Harvard study in question, "The Work, Family, and Equity Index:
> Where Does the United States Stand Globally?" (by Jody Heymann, Alison
> Earle, Stephanie Simmons, Stephanie M. Breslow, and April Kuehnhoff of
> The Project on Global Working Families, available at
> <http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/globalworkingfamilies/images/report.pdf>),
> reveals many more areas where American women enjoy fewer rights than
> women in many other countries in the world:
>
> Areas where the U.S. lags behind:
>
> Working conditions
>
> • 163 countries around the world offer guaranteed paid leave to women
> in connection with childbirth. The U.S. does not.
>
> • The only other industrialized country which does not have paid
> maternity or parental leave for women, Australia, guarantees a full
> year of unpaid leave to all women in the country. In contrast, the
> Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) in the U.S. provides only 12 weeks
> of unpaid leave to approximately half of mothers in the U.S. and
> nothing for the remainder.
>
> • 45 countries ensure that fathers either receive paid paternity leave
> or have a right to paid parental leave. The United States guarantees
> fathers neither paid paternity nor paid parental leave.
>
> • At least 76 countries protect working women's right to breastfeed;
> the U.S. does not, in spite of the fact that breastfeeding has been
> shown to reduce infant mortality several-fold.
>
> • In fact, nearly two-thirds of these countries protect breastfeeding
> for 15 months or longer. Nearly nine out of ten protect this right
> for at least a year.
>
> • At least 96 countries around the world in all geographic regions and
> at all economic levels mandate paid annual leave. The U.S. does not
> require employers to provide paid annual leave.
>
> • At least 37 countries have policies guaranteeing parents some type
> of paid leave specifically for when their children are ill. Of these
> countries, two-thirds guarantee more than a week of paid leave, and
> more than one-third guarantee 11 or more days.
>
> • 139 countries provide paid leave for short- or long-term illnesses,
> with 117 providing a week or more annually. The U.S. provides only
> unpaid leave for serious illnesses through the FMLA, which does not
> cover all workers.
>
> • 40 countries have government-mandated evening and night wage
> premiums. The U.S. does not.
>
> • At least 98 countries require employers to provide a mandatory day
> of rest: a period of at least 24 hours off each week. The U.S. does
> not guarantee workers this weekly break.
>
> • At least 84 countries have laws that fix the maximum length of the
> work week. The U.S. does not have a maximum length of the work week
> or a limit on mandatory overtime per week.
>
> • 42 countries guarantee leave for major family events; in 37 of these
> countries, the leave is paid.
>
> Services for children
>
> • The U.S. is tied with Ecuador and Suriname for 39th in enrollment in
> early childhood care and education for 3–5 year olds. Nearly all
> European countries perform better. A wide range of developing and
> transitioning countries had higher enrollment rates than the U.S.,
> despite being poorer.
>
> • The U.S. is tied for 91st out of 151 countries in the area of
> preprimary student-to-staff ratios.
>
> • In terms of the percentage of GDP spent on early childhood
> education, recent data place the U.S. in a seven-way tie for 13th
> place out of 30 OECD countries. Previous studies of a larger number of
> countries showed the United States to be 20th out of 72 countries.
> The relatively low percentage of GDP spent is of particular concern,
> given the low enrollment and low student-to-staff ratios.
>
> • Fifty-four nations have longer school years than the U.S. Twenty of
> these countries have a school year which is more than 20 days longer
> than that of the U.S., adding practically a full month to the school
> calendar.
>