Learning to tell the time was once a joint venture between school and home. On the wall of the Nationaal Onderwijsmuseum (Dordrecht, the Netherlands) hangs a row of ten classroom clocks, the kind generations of children used to practise reading the time. In my hands I hold a cardboard teaching clock, boldly printed with the words: ‘For Home and School Instruction’.
How did children actually learn to tell the time?
It began as an exercise in arithmetic. The hour hand and the minute hand. Hours and minutes. Repetition did the rest: on the hour, half past, quarter past, quarter to. Nine o’clock in the morning: school begins. Half past three: time to go home. A quarter past seven: bedtime.
Your First Watch
Before long, clocks seemed to be everywhere. A beautiful wind-up clock stood proudly on the mantelpiece in the living room. An electric clock hung above the kitchen door. An alarm clock rested on your parents‘ bedside table. Shopkeepers mounted clocks outside their stores. Railway stations displayed them in the concourse and on every platform. Every church had its clock tower. Then there was the wristwatch, with its relentless second hand quietly marking the passage of time.
How did you get your first watch? Was it a cherished hand-me-down from an aunt or uncle? Or a sparkling new one for your seventh birthday? Being able to tell the time made you feel grown up. Wearing a watch was proof of it.
Be at school on time. Don’t forget football practice. Music lessons start at four. The birthday party ends at eight. Regularity. Order. Discipline. At what point did you realise that the clock had become the invisible conductor of everyday life?
Secondary school introduced another instrument of time discipline: the school diary. You filled its pages with timetables—another subject every hour—homework, presentations, quizzes, tests, revision week, and eventually the final examination schedule. Often it felt overwhelming. There was simply too much to keep track of. In moments of frustration, you scratched the words ‚Diary of Misery‘ across the cover in oversized letters.
The clock – and later its companion, the paper planner or digital calendar – is, at heart, an educational technology. Its purpose is to prepare pupils for the demands of adult life beyond the school gates. Meetings to attend. Tasks to complete. Targets to meet. Deadlines to keep. Fail to do so, and there are consequences.
Living Under the Clock
The German philosopher and historian Rüdiger Safranski argues that for centuries we have lived under what he calls a strict regime of time: fixed working hours, carefully rationed leisure, and tightly scheduled periods for education and self-improvement.
In Zeit – Was sie mit uns macht und was wir aus ihr machen (2015), Safranski observes that in the twenty-first century the network of intersecting timelines has become denser than ever. We find ourselves caught in a web of schedules, some imposed by others, many imposed by ourselves. Time occupies our thoughts almost constantly: how to use it efficiently, save it, spend it wisely, or give it to someone else. Under this pressure, he argues, we begin to treat time as though it were a material object – something that can be sliced into units, made productive, invested, or wasted.
Time is money. Time is scarce.
Yet this, of course, is a fiction. Time itself cannot be possessed. Like many philosophers before him, Safranski ultimately approaches time as an existential question. Human life is finite, and the passing of time reminds us, uncomfortably, of our own mortality. Rather than confronting that reality, we allow time to become a social authority that governs our lives.
As a bittersweet conclusion, Safranski quotes what he calls a nursery rhyme for adults: ‚So often, through the duties of everyday life, our brief existence on earth slips from view.‘
This short essay is based on ‘Strikt regime’, originally published in the Dutch educational journal Didactief (May 2022).