Last autumn when Manuela Maier signed her children up for an all-day school program in Germany and went back to work, she was "ostracized" by everyone in town.  They called her a "Rabenmutter, or raven mother, after the black bird that pushes chicks out of the nest."  (I guess that's the opposite of a "helicopter parent.")

For over 250 years, school for German children has ended at lunchtime.  This of course required a parent at home to care for them.  As opposed to America, for example, where all-day (or most-day) schooling is the norm, and both parents can take jobs outside the home.  A single mother in Germany is in big trouble, unable to accept full-time employment because she has to be home when the kids get out of school at noon.

Finally the barrier is beginning to crack, and German schools are slowly adding afternoon classes to their curriculum.  The New York Times identifies a lot of reasons for this, although they fail to point out the obvious one, which is "DUH."

Of course, it's easy for us to say that, but here in America children do not attend school at all in the summer, which causes a seasonal child care crisis just as severe as the one German parents used to face.  And it makes just as little sense.  

The German system was created at a time when child labor was an important part of the work force, and kids had to go to work after they finished school at noon.  Here in America our nine-month schedule has its roots in agricultural times, when kids had to be out of school during the summer to help with the crops.  Neither system makes a lick of sense in the year 2010, but both persist out of habit as well as a deeply entrenched sentimentality.

The German system began to shift back in 2001, when a survey found that German literacy rates among 15 year olds was falling sharply.  The government began to release funds for all-day schooling, to help bridge the literacy gap.  This program was seized upon by women who wanted to go back to work.

After WWII, women in East Germany were - despite being under oppressive Communist rule - granted more equality than women almost anywhere else in the world.  The Communist government "set up free day care centers and all-day schools."  As a result, women entered the workforce in droves.  In West Germany, however, "until 1977 officially needed husbands' permission to work."

After the reunification of Germany in 1989, the West for a long time saw state sponsored child care as a remnant of the bad old days of Communism.  Although all-day school seems to have remained in place in what used to be East Germany, it was very slow to spread to the democratic West Germany.

On the rise of all-day school programs, the German labor minister Ursula von der Layen said, "The 21st century belongs to women."  I can get behind that - let's make it happen!