Demographics, studies and military service
A Greek father argues that reducing educational timelines and completing military service earlier would enable younger marriages and increase birth rates more effectively than government subsidies.
Today I was talking in the car with my daughter, as I was driving to take her to the bus station so she could travel to the city where she’s studying at university. She was telling me about her dreams, her future, how eager she is to finish her studies (she’s a sophomore), to work, to start a family.
I was deeply moved, because in her enthusiastic words, I recognized my own self three decades ago, when I was in a hurry to finish university, my master’s degree, and my military service—which was 18 months in the army back then—so I could truly start my life.
At 28 I got married, after finishing all of the above, and we had three children. If I had completed everything earlier, though, I would very likely have had four or even five children.
The statistically strong correlation between timely marriage age and number of children is proven, since the couple has many more years of fertile biological period within their marriage.
I have written many times my firm opinion that the socialist position of providing subsidies to support parents with children is not going to solve the demographic problem in the slightest. Do we truly want as a society to have more Greek children?
Let’s reduce high school years by one year, graduate from university in three years—not four—and have the right to accelerate your course exams, so you have the opportunity to complete your studies in 18 or 24 months.
Military service for men should be completed right after high school, at age 17, so they don’t have the obligation of conscription as a permanent weight hanging over their youth. Young people should be functional citizens of society even at 20 years old, working, starting families early in the third decade of their lives and not in the fourth or fifth.
This position is based on simple mathematics, along with basic principles of human biology. Principles, in other words, that every shortsighted and socialistically delirious state refuses to adopt.
Instead of targeting the root of the problem regarding demographics, we turn our gaze elsewhere and try to avoid the reality that in an increasingly technologically accelerated world, we continuously place obstacles before our youth, preventing them from becoming productive and creative early on and from starting their families, from having many healthy children at the right biological age, from laying the foundation for all our futures.
