I recently listened to a fascinating conversation with Amia Srinivasan, author of The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century. Her interviewer was quite concerned about declining fertility rates and didn’t seem to be making some important connections. Amia made an poignant comment about how important childcare is to women’s liberation, and more specifically 24 hour day care availability. It would seem that a project like OneSchool it in line with her philosophy
Amia – “Someone like Adrienne Rich wants to distinguish between the potentiality of human reproduction from the actual political institution that is motherhood. What is that institution? It’s an institution that has privatized the responsibility of childbirth, childcare, child-rearing into individual families. There’s still no universal 24-hour childcare.”…
“What are some things you want? Universal 24-hour childcare, universal excellent pre-K education. You want non-stagnating wages that don’t presuppose two full-time workers. You want better maternal healthcare. You want free universal healthcare — all of these basic social provisions. Now, you might think, “Okay, but Scandinavian countries, which have some of this stuff, don’t . . .” Well, they have some of this stuff.”…
In my conversation with Anthony Kim, he mentioned his motivation for exploring a 24 hour school was parents working odd hours. This shows how flexible we need to be with supporting each other and getting out of the assembly line model of society.
I’m not promoting this as a primary way to make people have more babies, more to show that there are so many interweaving factors to phenomena as declining populations in the developed world. Why is population decline something worth paying attention to? Mostly so we have enough earning young people to fund for the rising costs of elder care (ie social security). Though, with appropriate planning, since the robots are coming, we can free up labor to do the real human jobs of education and personal care.