In Japan, no additional cleaning staff are hired for schools. The students themselves, from a young age, sweep their classrooms, arrange the desks, and leave everything ready before they go home.
It is not a punishment or a minor chore: it is a quiet way of teaching that shared spaces are also everyone’s responsibility. And this custom is not exclusive to Japan; many people around the world remember doing the same thing at their own school, even though it was never mandatory.
Evangelina Moreno proposes exactly that: that schools encourage these habits so children grow up understanding respect for other people’s work and care for what belongs to everyone. Because there are lessons that no book teaches as well as a broom in hand.
