Newsgroup: it.istruzione.scuola
Titolo: insegnamento e tempo libero

sul tema del soggetto mi pare che quest'articolo uscito oggi sul New York 
Times sia piu' interessante delle cose dette da Rutelli e De Rita, anche se 
qui si parla di istruzione post-secondaria.
Scusate l'assenza di traduzione:
New York Times - September 4, 2006
The Summer Next Time
By TOM LUTZ
Palm Desert, Calif.
IN late May, for those of us who teach, the summer stretches out like the 
great expanse of freedom it was in grammar school. Ah, the days on the beach! 
The books we will read! The adventures we will have!
But before hunkering down to months of leisurely lolling around a pool 
slathered in S.P.F. 80, we need to take care of a few things: see what got 
buried in the e-mail pile over the course of the year, write a few letters of 
recommendation, and finally get to those book reviews we agreed to do. A few 
leftover dissertation chapters. The syllabuses and book orders for next 
year's classes. Then those scholarly articles we were snookered into writing 
when the deadlines were far, far in the future ã deadlines that now, 
magically, are receding into the past. My God, did I really tell someone I 
would write an article called "Teaching Claude McKay"? Before we know it, the 
summer is eaten up, we're still behind on our e-mail, and the fall semester 
looms.
On paper, the academic life looks great. As many as 15 weeks off in the 
summer, four in the winter, one in the spring, and then, usually, only three 
days a week on campus the rest of the time. Anybody who tells you this wasn't 
part of the lure of a job in higher education is lying. But one finds out 
right away in graduate school that in fact the typical professor logs an 
average of 60 hours a week, and the more successful professors work even more 
ã including not just 14-hour days during the school year, but 10-hour days in 
the summer as well.
Why, then, does there continue to be a glut of fresh Ph.D.'s? It isn't the 
pay scale, which, with a few lucky exceptions, offers the lowest 
years-of-education-to-income ratio possible. It isn't really the work itself, 
either. Yes, teaching and research are rewarding, but we face as much 
drudgery as in any professional job. Once you've read 10,000 freshman essays, 
you've read them all.
But we academics do have something few others possess in this postindustrial 
world: control over our own time. All the surveys point to this as the most 
common factor in job satisfaction. The jobs in which decisions are made and 
the pace set by machines provide the least satisfaction, while those, like 
mine, that foster at least the illusion of control provide the most.
Left to our own devices, we seldom organize our time with 8-to-5 discipline. 
The pre-industrial world of agricultural and artisan labor was structured by 
what the historian E. P. Thompson calls "alternate bouts of intense labor and 
of idleness wherever men were in control of their working lives." 
Agricultural work was seasonal, interrupted by rain, forced into 
hyperactivity by the threat of rain, and determined by other uncontrollable 
natural processes. The force of long cultural habit ensured that the change 
from such discontinuous tasks to the regimented labor of the factory never 
went particularly smoothly.
In 1877 a New York cigar manufacturer grumbled that his cigar makers could 
never be counted on to do a straight shift's work. They would "come down to 
the shop in the morning, roll a few cigars," he complained to The New York 
Herald, "and then go to a beer saloon and play pinochle or some other game." 
The workers would return when they pleased, roll a few more cigars, and then 
revisit the saloon, all told "working probably two or three hours a day." 
Cigar makers in Milwaukee went on strike in 1882 simply to preserve their 
right to leave the shop at any time without their foreman's permission.
In this the cigar workers were typical. American manufacturing laborers came 
and left for the day at different times. "Monday," one manufacturer 
complained, was always "given up to debauchery," and on Saturdays, brewery 
wagons came right to the factory, encouraging workers to celebrate payday. 
Daily breaks for "dramming" were common, with workers coming and going from 
the work place as they pleased. Their workdays were often, by 20th-century 
standards, riddled with breaks for meals, snacks, wine, brandy and reading 
the newspaper aloud to fellow workers.
An owner of a New Jersey iron mill made these notations in his diary over the 
course of a single week:
"All hands drunk."
"Jacob Ventling hunting."
"Molders all agree to quit work and went to the beach."
"Peter Cox very drunk."
"Edward Rutter off a-drinking."
At the shipyards, too, workers stopped their labor at irregular intervals and 
drank heavily. One ship's carpenter in the mid-19th century described an 
almost hourly round of breaks for cakes, candy and whiskey, while some of his 
co-workers "sailed out pretty regularly 10 times a day on the average" to the 
"convenient grog-shops." Management attempts to stop such midday drinking 
breaks routinely met with strikes and sometimes resulted in riots. During 
much of the 19th century, there were more strikes over issues of time-control 
than there were about pay or working hours.
I was recently offered a non-teaching job that would have almost doubled my 
salary, but which would have required me to report to an office in standard 
8-to-5 fashion. I turned it down, and for a moment I felt like the circus 
worker in the joke: he follows the elephant with a shovel, and when offered 
another job responds, "What, and give up show business?"
Really, though, I'm more like Jacob Ventling and Edward Rutter. I don't go 
out 10 times a day for a dram of rum, but I could. And in fact, maybe I will. 
Next summer.
---
Tom Lutz is the author of "Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, 
Slackers and Bums in America."

 The jobs in which decisions are made and
the pace set by machines provide the least satisfaction, while those, like
mine, that foster at least the illusion of control provide the most.
Fratello Tom, hai ragione da vendere. Peccato che i cosiddetti "manager"
italiani non si rendano conto che negando questa liberta' ai propri
dipendenti si siano circondati di gente grigia (nella migliore delle
ipotesi) o di pazzi arrivisti senza scrupoli (nella peggiore).
Michele