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No time on their hands: Children and the narrative architecture of school diaries
Colin Symes Time Society 2012 21: 156 DOI: 10.1177/0961463X10380022 The online version of this article can be found at: http://tas.sagepub.com/content/21/2/156

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No time on their hands: Children and the narrative architecture of school diaries1
Colin Symes
Macquarie University, Australia

Time & Society 21(2) 156174 ! The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0961463X10380022 tas.sagepub.com

Abstract Diaries are elements of a schools documentary reality. They possess a complex narrative architecture and serve multiple functions. In addition to playing an important role in inducting students into the adroit chronometry of contemporary work, the school diary is also a manual of self-government, given that much of it deals with goal setting, managing health and conflict resolution. On the grounds that it ameliorates communication between the school and parents, the diary, unlike its adult counterparts, is subject to regular inspection. As such, it is part of the machinery of surveillance and accountability that are features of neo-liberalist schooling. Keywords Chronometry, diaries, neo-liberalism, school time, Toyotaism
Make it clear to him that the clock cannot be argued with and that when it is time to leave for school, for Daddy to go to work, for Mummy to attend to her duties, then these changes are as incontestable as the tides (McEwan, 1988: 27)

Be it the duration of the school calendar, the ages at which students should begin and end their schooling, the amount of time to be allotted to school
Corresponding author: Colin Symes, Department of Education, Macquarie University, Balaclava Road, North Ryde, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia. Email: Colin.Symes@mq.edu.au

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subjects, many areas of education are tied ineluctably to issues of time. While other parts of the school system have been renovated, attempts to modernise the school calendar and the school timetable have been resisted. Focus on the schools temporal calibration can draw attention away from the role it performs in transmitting the horology of broader society. For instance, through their hidden curriculum schools helped induct young people into the temporal discipline of industrial capitalism (Ball et al., 1984; Watkins, 1993). They augmented and eventually supplanted the role churches and, before them, the monasteries played in standardizing horological values, invoking the same homilies to encourage responsible time usage (Glennie and Thrift, 1996; Mumford, 1934; Thompson, 1967; Weber, 1930/2001).2 One facet of this has involved the neutralization of kairological time, a temporal attitude characterized by individuals undertaking activities on whim and impulse (Weinrich, 2008: 91). Arguably, the whole thrust of the timescape (ancient and modern) has focused on weakening kairological impulses in favour of chronological ones, which are determined by calendars and clocks, deadlines and dates. This process begins early in the home and at school. The school timetable, which requires students to follow a preset epistemological clock, epitomizes chronological time at its most organized and prescribed (Adam, 1999: 110; Urry, 2009: 184; Zerubavel, 1981: 14). In deferring to its demands, students learn that public time overrides private time school-time overrides self-time. In doing so, they also come to accept that the capacity to manage devices (including such mnemo-texts as diaries) for metering time, to observe temporal etiquette, and to use time eciently, are indices of personal and social eciency (Zerubavel, 1981), key markers of modern time-consciousness, contemporality. Arguably, recent developments in information technology such as mobile phones and laptop computers have added new dimensions to contemporality. In enabling individuals to be in several places at once (at home while at work), important divides, characteristic of industrial time such as those between work and leisure, have been blurred if not obliterated (Basso, 2003; Eriksen, 2001: 127).3 Such technology has increased the levels of timespace compression and timespace densication, and has been instrumental in catalysing an expeditionary culture in which speed is a dominant imperative. Thus, rather than having the time burden lifted from their shoulders, families now report that they lead accelerated lives, and that time is a commodity in short supply, which the increased demands of millennium schooling have exacerbated (Agger, 2004).4 One mark of these demands is the increasing interpenetration between the spheres of the school and home, and which school diaries, whose use is evident across all sectors of education but especially in high schools, are

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textual manifestations. While diaries assist students to script their school commitments and to arrange their time to maximize its scholastic value, the narrative architecture (Genette, 1997) underpinning these processes is a complex one, and makes reference not just to time management but also to the management of the self in general. In this article, I analyse the school diaries of twelve Australian government and non-government high schools for the year 2009. I argue that their textualizations of time, on paper at least, owe much to the individualizing imperatives of the neo-liberal state and the temporality of Toyotaism, and which the publishers of diaries have spread to schools. Since the diaries share much the same narrative architecture and philosophy of time, other than when it is pertinent, I avoid referring specically to actual diaries by type of, or school of origin. Nor do I analyse how students actually write themselves into diaries; rather the focus of this article is the architecture in which their writing is located.

Chronicles of organization
Narrative architecture is a term developed by French literary critic Gerard Genette (1997) to refer to those structures or epitexts which embed a book and which reside outside and alongside its main text, in its front, side and back regions. One element of this architecture is the books sub-script. This includes its pagination, lineation and indexes, which serve to calibrate a book, enabling it to be navigated. Other epitexts include footnotes, dustcovers, forewords, acknowledgements, and even epigraphs and dedications. Though such epitexts are structurally peripheral, Genette argues that by locating texts in a broader context they are extremely telling elements of a books narrative. To these one could add another overlooked by Genette but also telling a books style of construction. One of the features of the diarys narrative architecture, as distinct from other printed books, is that most of its pages are free from narrative are blank. Their very blankness signies opportunity (Perkins, 2001: 15) of time needing to be lled. In this sense, a diary is only a partially worked-out text. And herein the diarys architectural form as a spatio-temporal construct5 follows its functions: its various divisions and pages are calibrated, notated, and allotted according to the measures of the Western calendar, on a month to month, week to week, day to day basis, with equal amounts of space allotted to them. Indeed, the calibration of this space in diaries is, as it is with industrial time in general, a scientic one based on the measures of the calendar and clock, with equal amounts of space being allotted to equal amounts of time, as if the passage of time is uniform, sequential and absolute, undierentiated. Time is represented cinematographically as a series of separate frames (May and Thrift, 2001: 22).

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However, there is one notable dierence between clock (mechanical) time and textual time: the latter is more qualitative, and therefore a much less accurate form of chronometry than that of the clock. Handwriting does not have the same precision as the hands of a clock. Ever since diaries for Boy Scouts and Girl Guides were rst issued during World War I, there have been diaries written for children. But it was not until the 1960s that diaries specically for university and school students, which were intended to foster the habit of keeping a diary, appeared. By todays standards, these diaries exhibited simple textual architecture, consisting of little more than the temporal basics; they were also small enough to be pocketed. The space for writing was therefore limited, which meant that their users were forced to use succinct phrasing or very small writing (Symes, 1999). However, they did contain 64 pages the standard for pocket diaries of information on letter writing, sporting records and ags of the world, reproduced in colour, on their end pages.6 The inventories of superlatives (longest rivers, highest mountains, largest cities, and so on) yet another take on Hackings (1990) avalanche of numbers that were features of these diaries have vanished. The contents of diaries are reections of their times. Curiously, given that inculcating apt time habits was a preoccupation of schooling, diaries gave no guidance on them. In the 1980s and 1990s, the printing industries adoption of computer technology enabled the publication of more niche-oriented diaries, which reected the particular requirements of businesses. It was claimed that such customizations, which included gilt edges and leather-bonded covers, added prestige and status to an organization. Thus, through the connotations of their design overlay, diaries (like watches (Freake, 1995)) are bearers of other meanings than just chronometric ones.7 Moreover, given that many of the processes involved were automated, diary production became much faster, and previous time-saving and standardizing measures such as over-printing were dropped. Another development at this time was a change in diary lexicon: many diaries, especially those designed with executives and managers in mind, were now called planners or organizers and reected their future-tense orientation, as forward-looking documents as documents of accountability rather than confession.

Booked time
According to one account, the rst school in New South Wales to adopt its own diary did so in 1975. The schools headmaster was concerned that many of his students lacked the capacity to use time judiciously, and he thought keeping a diary might redress this. Other schools soon followed suit, such that by the mid-1980s, most of the high-end non-government

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schools in Sydney were issuing, at no cost to their students, diaries.8 By todays standards, they were small (B5) and minimalist in terms of their narrative architecture, consisting of a few introductory pages of essential information (often relating, tellingly, to the schools history) followed by the actual diary, which was organized along the lines of a conventional diary and on which the highlights of the schools calendar were overprinted in red (e.g. Europe Trip Departs; Parents and Friends Spring Fashion Parade). Although schools began to bulk out their diarys front matter with more and more information, it was not until the mid-1990s that school diaries acquired their current narrative architecture. This was in large measure at the behest of the schools, which were responding to the new imperatives governing school systems and which, arguably, created scope for the school diary to be used in new ways. The ascendancy of neo-liberalist policies in the early 1990s forced schools of all persuasions to become conscious of their image, on a range of fronts but particularly that on paper, in documents such as prospectuses circulating in the public domain (Apple, 2001; Gottschall et al., 2010; Marginson, 1997; Symes, 1998). The adoption by schools of better looking diaries was one outcome of this development. In recognizing that they could help schools to aestheticize their documents, many printers entered the school diary business ( . . . fantastic product to showcase your school in its local community). They oered schools opportunities to customize their diaries in smarter, more child-centred ways that the traditional, multinational publishers of diaries resisted because the production runs involved were small (between 100 and 1000). These same printers also sought to take advantage of other aspects of the neo-liberal settlement such as the annual reports schools were required to produce, and for which a suitably business-like format was deemed desirable, and also the growth in educational merchandise (another oshoot of impression management) by oering schools branded key rings, mugs, lanyards and pens. There are a number of features worth noting about the revamped school diary. The rst and most obvious of these is its dimensions, which in line with the fact that there is more to write about and more to communicate are larger and more voluminous than their forerunners. Second is its construction, which can be tailored to suit a schools budgetary priorities (since it is the school which pays for the diary). Most manufacturers produce inexpensive, no-frills diaries (designed to suit the budget-conscious), which are wiro-bound, have vinyl, easy to clean covers, and are built to withstand the rough and tumble of schooling (this diary will not fall apart). At the other extreme, and catering to the more image conscious schools, are the more upmarket diaries (stylish and elegant). These utilize better quality materials and construction such as cloth boards or leather look material,

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hand-sewn (even though it is not) stitching, silk or satin bookmarks (available in the colours of the school), and customized covers (Your font cover can display the life of your school in stunning colour); in other words, the type of materials and construction are held to confer educational cachet. Thus, they look classier than their vinyl analogues and stand out in the symbolic economy because only a few schools generally the more exclusive, non-government schools and their pecuniary emulators in the government sector can aord them. In another reection of the times, schools can now opt for green diaries manufactured from low carbon emission products. Another major dierence between diaries of new and those of old and hence, their increased size is the amount, and the complexity, of its calendrical arrangement, i.e. space allocated to time. Whereas in the past school diaries followed the practices of diaries in general and devoted a week to an opening, with a relatively small space for each school day, and a smaller space (because they are not) for Saturday and Sunday, the representation of the school week in the diary is more graphically complex. That shown in Figure 1 is framed by two axes, which embed several columns and rows. The vertical axis comprises the days and dates of the week, which, with the exceptions of Saturday and Sunday, are given equal time, with public holidays shaded, e.g. Australia Day. Given that the page on the right is not shaded, there is the implication that though the school is closed that does not mean that students should close themselves to study. Along the horizontal axis are ve columns, enabling a students study commitments to be located appropriately (Comments, Subject, Homework and Assignments, Date Due, Check). Though not stated, the division between the left and right pages is a spatial one: whereas the entries on the left are school ones, those on the right are home ones, where the exercise of time is more discretionary than it is at school, and for which students will need to self-assign time. In the light of this, the home-page is much more lineated than the school-page, and requires students to place their study obligations on the line, day by day (only the weekend is exempt from this) in an orderly and logical manner, utilizing the previous categories and to check o the completion of assignments, and for any remaining assignments to be transferred to the top of the next page (next week), to the Continuing Assignment Check List, and for the student to check them o ad nauseam. This algorithmic listing and checking of assignments and re-listing of those that remain incomplete constitute another example of the check-box mentality also evident in the resurgence of rote learning and ll-in-the-blank answers in education generally (Agger and Shelton, 2007: 97). It discourages, and even penalizes, thinking outside the box.

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Figure 1. These are two pages from a typical wiro-bound school diary. It is from the first week of the school year. Interestingly, the diary commences at this week and ends during the last week before Christmas: thus, the diary does not represent the full calendar year, and implies that the weeks leading up to, and immediately after, the school year are study-free.

Time signature
But the most insidious form of this mentality is that the ticking o (an apt phrase in this context) is to be undertaken by the parent/caregiver and teacher, space for their signatures being allotted for this purpose in the footer. Moreover, a spot at the front of the diary is assigned for a parent/caregiver to supply their signature and which allows the authenticity of its weekly iteration (lest there be any doubts about its provenance) to be checked. In the past the diary was regarded as a private, condential document, primarily intended as a place for self-communication and confession. The fact that many older diaries could be locked reinforced the diarys privacy structurally (Symes, 1999). This continues to be the case, though more by etiquette than actual structure. But this is not the case with that of the student diary. In the interests of enhancing the partnership between the

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school, the parents and the student and improving communication between them, the school diary is a public document that is subject to weekly inspection. Moreover, it is not just the temporal performance of students that is the subject of surveillance. By allotting space for the purpose, the diary provides a means for checking whether students take school notices home or not, their movements outside school during class time, reasons for being late and absent, going home early, test results and appointments. In so doing, the diary regulates the student, serving to check any inclination to transgress. Diaries also function as educational go-betweens. They are structured in such a way as to encourage parents and teachers to write notes to one another, with the student acting as a courier between home and school, and vice versa. Notes sections (one of the reasons why the diaries had to be larger) are provided for this purpose, and at least of two of the diaries examined provided sample pages of how such communication is to be undertaken. Arguably, such epistolary interchange reects the neo-liberalist thrust for more client-centred education, with many middle class parents wanting a greater voice in their childs schooling (Ball and Vincent, 2001). They can now do so, albeit at arms length, via these notes. Further, this has the double advantage for time-famished parents of not having to front up to the school and of being frictionless. Moreover, because so much of the action of the school is recorded in the diary it also provides more transparency about a childs schooling, which is another thrust of neo-liberalist schooling. Thus, the school diary is not a self-authored document at all. Parents and teachers have right of access to its pages and are encouraged to add their comments, which does not apply to other students (who are forbidden to write in it). This has the eect of dissuading students from committing any condences to its pages. Indeed, they are told that their diary is not a personal or social one and they are enjoined not to include personal or private material. Thus although on the surface the diary acts as an anti-amnesiac device (Young, 1988), it has evolved into a document with a more sinister subscript, that of supplying a record of a students life, hour-by-hour, dayby-day, week-by-week, both inside and outside school. In eect, it functions as a desktop resume, providing an inventory of misdemeanours and transgressions, commitments and achievements. In short, the diary is a temporal incarnation of the panopticon, or properly speaking, since much of the surveillance is conducted through signatures and notes, a cheiropticon, one that enables the students time at school (not to mention, home) to be envisioned as a series of hand-written, autographed entries. In xing time on paper, it has the secondary eect of certifying the power and authority of inscription.

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Clocking on
The fact that their manufacturers were able to oer schools the option of including, moreover in a professionally formatted way, institutionally specic information in their dairies, information which hitherto had been consigned to a school handbook, which in the image conscious 1990s was beginning to appear shoddy and outmoded, was part of their appeal. But there was an even more compelling reason as to why it was only natural that the diary, as the time book par excellence, should usurp its role, and that was the fact that much of the prescription in the old handbooks was actually time-related. And although the school diary is no longer only a time book and contains much other content relating to school policy, a large percentage of its pages are still given over to temporal matters (Its not ok to stay away; Regular and punctual attendance at school is necessary). The fact that the references to time are concentrated in a single volume only serves to underlie its educational importance. In no other organization are actors (and that includes the teachers) made to feel conscious of the passage and organization of time so handcued to the hands of a clock. Although time thrift might now take a corporate form, it is still predicated on the same Franklinesque calculus: time is money, precious, and thou shalt not waste it! And those that do so are required to make up for lost time, in their own time (attend behaviour detention for three hours on Saturday; . . . students deemed to be habitually late will be required to make up the time in detention). This is a reminder that schools (like prisons) use time punitively, in the shape of detentions, to reshape refractory behaviour. In part, this heightening of temporal consciousness helps induct students into contemporality; but it is also helps to ensure that the school runs like clockwork, on time, with only minimal disruptions to its schedules, even though in reality this proves to be a forlorn hope (Harris, 1982).9 But in allowing their handbooks to be incorporated into a commercially produced diary, schools relinquished control over some of their content, which is selected for them. Admittedly, some of this content, such as spelling rules, mathematical formula and grammar, is study-related. Yet, in sharing their context with the discursive realm of punctuality, the diary reinforces the idea of a society governed by rules and order, where everything is clear-cut and unambiguous. It is a world of single-mindedness, where the margin for error is zero and matters are contradiction-free. Hence, it is only appropriate that diaries also include jokes, riddles, puzzles and quizzes as light relief, presumably, but also reinforcing the aforementioned check box mentality, where questions are answered but never raised. This same mentality also applies other matters now included in school diaries such as conict resolution, healthy eating, physical tness and stress

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control, which were omitted from school handbooks. These create the impression that time management is a subset of corporeal management. But by including such advice the assumption is presumably made by diary publishers that these matters are not covered in school or, if they are, they are neither corporate nor contemporary enough, and that the school is locked into a regime of training that the real world has abandoned. Indeed, one can observe notable dierences between those parts of the diary supplied by the school and those supplied by their publishers. Whereas the former are grounded in rules and detail the consequences of persistent disciplinary infraction, and construct students as powerless individuals in a bureaucracy, those of the latter are grounded in the discourse of a nucleated self, whose positively powered energies should be marshalled for the personal benets that accrue. The impression is given in line with neoliberalist theories of subjectivity (Rose, 1996: 153) that students have the capacity to engineer and steer themselves, especially if they adopt the diarys advice on managing the mind and body. It is in accordance with this selfpowered philosophy that the diarys text is informal, more personalized: If I have been absent from school . . . ; YES! You can have more time to do all the things you want and do your homework and study. This is also reected in the faux arithmetic used to formulate the principles of self-engineering in action: your input your output. By contrast, the school sections are more distant and formal If a student is found to have plagiarized . . . ; All girls are expected . . . and adopt the cadences of ocialdom. They also pay heed to social justice discourses, which the most canonical forms of neo-liberalism regard as disruptive (Hayek, 1976). However, Australian school diaries, unlike some of their equivalents in the United States, have yet to include advertising (Schor, 2004: 89).10

Time sheets
The temporal philosophy underpinning school diaries is one implying that time can be planned and organized, manipulated and manoeuvred, and that it is not necessarily an incorrigible force in our lives, even our school lives. Time can be brought under our control. It can be put into place, and that place is the diary. For once time is written down, inscribed on the page, it becomes editable, calculable and amenable to intervention. The accent of the school diary, then, is on planning the future rather than recording the past. Its emphasis is on the henceforth not hitherto. It provides a text for working out what has to be done and when, not what has been done. It is kept not to keep a record of the past, but to organize the future. In regard to this, in order to get the best from their diaries students are

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encouraged during class to record all homework, other assignments and test dates accurately, write down (in pencil so that you make changes easily) when essays and projects are due, and when tests and quizzes are scheduled and then when at home to schedule their time in 30 to 40 minute blocks (as at high school), prioritize work with the most pressing and crucial rst, and so on. They are even presented with a study planner exemplifying how an educational day (which includes the time at school) should be spent. It commences at 6.15 am and continues through to 10 pm, with every hour accounted for. It shows how the hours before and after school and at weekends (the majority of which are to be devoted to homework) should be allotted: 1 hour for dinner, 45 minutes on Monday before school for swimming practice, 3 hours on Friday night for a parttime job, 2 hours on Sunday for leisure, and so on. In one diary the temporal prescription even extends to the duration of parties: those for juniors should be held in the afternoons, lasting for 3 hours maximum; those for seniors should nish no later than 12.30 am. Given that the majority of the time at school is prescribed and students have very little discretion over its exercise, it is not surprising then that much of the temporal advice relates to making the time outside school count. This amounts to bringing the study regimen of school home, which has spatial implications: students will need to create an appropriately equipped, lit and ventilated study zone and where all you will do is homework and study . . . This means no eating, no drinking, no game playing, no daydreaming, no music . . . . As with so much in the non-school sections of the diaries, the gravity of the proscription is mollied by a semi-jocular rhetoric. Serious matters are presented in a vernacular style, using teenage cadences (Its seriously QUIET in here) and cartoons, illustrative, quite literally, of the benets of life according to the edicts of time management. The grave business of time management is not without its funny side, it seems. But it does mean adopting ascetic habits long on self-denial, short on instant gratication. For example, it is noted that once the school year commences the student is likely to feel harried and their experience of time poverty acute the chronic disease of our times. This can lead to bad habits such as cravings for junk food and the abandonment of tness routines, which are counterproductive because they exacerbate anxiety. The proper antidote it is suggested, is managing time eectively through the use of a daily organizer, which can actually save time up to as much as a third thus creating more time for leisure activities such as sports, and visiting with friends and thereby leading to more a balanced, less anxious and school-dominated life. Even succumbing to the craving for junk food can be oset by students taking a 10 minute break in every half-hour period

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of study (why not at school, too?), during which they should take an exercise snack: collect the mail, take the dog for a walk, and so on. What is notable about this advice is that it represents a shift from the discourses of time found in schools for much of the twentieth century, which were located in time thrift, in the idea of time as a commodity, to be spent productively rather than wasted. But none of the diaries sampled ever referred to time thrift other than in oblique ways. In line with the shift to neo-liberalist individualism, it has been superseded by the discourse of time management, where the onus is placed on students to organize their time and not have it organized for them. In the sink or swim clime of neoliberalism, self-regarding behaviour receives priority. It is not that diary designers and readers are steeped in the theory of acting responsibly; it is rather that such theory has seeped through to quotidian discourse and is so deeply ingrained in its fabric that individuals unthinkingly adopt its tenets, never interrogating its justication or, worse still, believe it to be sound. And diary publishers, at the pain of not acting responsibly, cannot aord to transgress the discourse climate. For example, schools no longer give students homework timetables; students are expected to compile their own. And if they cannot, the diary advises them how to do so, and if that is insucient, they are referred to websites, with more detailed advice on the matter. The time problem is thereby individualized not institutionalized, and rather than turning to the school for help students are encouraged to adopt the measures prescribed in the diary to alleviate chronic anxiety. This is not atypical of the imperatives of the neo-liberal state and the neo-liberal school, which inveigh against bureaucratic, welfare approaches as interventionist, as against the interests of autonomy and liberty. Instead, individuals are encouraged to be self-governed, and held responsible for their own self-renovation and treatment. This has led to a huge proliferation of selfhelp titles (Rimke, 2000: 70), many incidentally dealing with time management and which the school diaries draw on for inspiration. In making light of time management, attention is diverted away from its nefarious economic goals. Even though students are made to believe that by careful planning they can undertake all their school work and still have enough time to have a life, what is not communicated in the school diary is, to paraphrase Marx (1976: 375), that even that life is by nature and right school-time, and is to be entirely devoted to self-expansion.

Just-in-Time school
The Toyotaism now driving many workplaces has had the eect of increasing the productivity of Taylorism. This was achieved through a

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range of strategies, called signicantly Just-in-Time (JIT), of which the principal was the methodical elimination of dead time from labour. For example, the useful working time in every minute was increased from 45 seconds (the maximum achieved under Taylorism) to 57 seconds (Adler, 1993: 97; Basso, 2003: 33; Ikuko, 2002), the aggregate gains to actual working time producing signicant gains in worker productivity over a period of year. Not surprisingly, companies and businesses facing increased competition from globalization embraced Toyotaism with some alacrity. Any opposition (now almost non-existent in the deregulated climate of neo-liberalized industrial relations) to Toyotaism was oset by the promise of signicant improvements to working conditions such as more autonomy for workers, more capacity to participate in workplace decision-making, and more opportunities for training and for working in teams. But these so-called improvements were not without their downsides; the quickened tempo of work, and which working in teams exacerbated, heightened stress and sick levels among workers, who could not cope with the expeditionary climate. The temporal regime that Toyotaism engendered, where no part of the day, week or year is quarantined from work (and which was once only found among shift workers), is now commonplace.11 Another feature of the new regimen is that the traditional hiatus between home and work has been de-dierentiated and more work is conducted at home (facilitated by mobile telephones and laptop computers) and also on the way to work and during breaks at work. In short, workers are on call 24/7. Technology thus has not only made work more time-intensive and intrusive but it has required time-shifting appliances for home routines to be undertaken. Family life would grind to a halt without the freezer, microwave and the dishwasher (Roberts, 2002; Shove, 2003); perhaps they should be seen as labour-extending devices! It is not even a case of working to live any longer, and certainly not a case of less work, more life; it is more a case of living to work, with any left-over time being available for additional work. The necessities of life such as eating and sleeping, rearing children, supporting the family, and having the body serviced are undertaken in whatever interstices exist in the rapacious work regimen. In an eort to schedule even more activities into overcrowded lives, families compile inventories of their obligations, so that they can see on paper what options they have for juggling and dovetailing them (ferrying children to school, on the way to work) (Southerton, 2003). They also use email and mobile phones to ne-tune engagements, and to undertake any last-minute editing when schedules go awry (Darrah et al., 2007: 82). The downside of such ne-tuning is that it itself is time-consuming, magnifying the feeling of not being able to cope, especially when the technology producing such time pressure malfunctions

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(Jarvis, 2005: 134). It is also emblematic of the way life now defers to work, that its demands override everything else, and that only adroit chronometry can make the lifework balance work. As the organizing principles of school diaries exemplify, the educational correlate of JIT is that childhood increasingly defers to schooling or, at least, that is the impression given by school diaries, which spread JIT philosophy to the school. It is another matter whether they take it up or not, and the version of JIT in schools has reduced time banditry (Donaldson, 1996: 56) and made education horologically more ecacious. But the intent is there. Students are informed that in the interests of study that they will need at least 7 to 10 hours of sleep, to allot 20 hours home study per week, should set aside at least 21 study sessions within these hours (the diary allows room for up to 30), and resist time-wasting diversions such as watching too much television and making too many mobile phone calls, especially to time-wasting friends, whom they should consider dropping. It is not that such diversions are verboten but that they should be taken only in moderation and then only as a means to revive the stamina for study. Other hazards include such work avoidance strategies as itting from activity to activity and never completing any of them, and procrastination, for which disciplined decision-making is the solution, meaning that the MUSTS and some of the SHOULDS get done each day. In short, it is about getting maximum value for the time you have and nding ways to make every (emphasis in the original) minute quality time; not quite Toyotaism down to the last second, but preciously close. Nor are school holidays spared. It is even suggested, in another echo of contemporality, that school holidays should be quarried for their potential study time an extra 50 hours for the educationally driven. Even the injunction that students should take regular breaks from their study is rationalized in terms of the fact that they will result in more eective study. As a graph in one diary demonstrates, the law of diminishing returns applies to excessive study. Overworking is counter-productive and regular intermissions (not too many) from the desk can help with study. They are not seen as intrinsically worthwhile, something to be enjoyed for their own sakes. In short, full-time study is precisely that, full meaning devoid of emptiness; more study and less life is the rule of the day. There are two reasons why children, particularly middle class children, must have their time lled to the plenum with school and after school units of action such as homework, music lessons, sports, study coaching and, later on, part-time work. One reason is that, in an era where the survival of the fastest (Rosa and Scheuerman, 2009: 8) is the prevailing dynamic of schooling, the child who is able to cram two educational lives into the one is likely to emerge triumphant. The second reason is that there is now

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widespread fear (often times, exaggerated) among policy-makers, teachers, and parents that the disengaged child is at risk, is likely to succumb to the enticements that now stalk children from myriad quarters: the new devils that tempt idle hands. These are not just outdoors in the shape of trac and predatory strangers, and which drove children indoors, but are also, courtesy the internet, indoors (Buckingham, 2000). The only solution is the total administration of the childs time; in short, they should have no time on their hands. It is this end that the narrative architecture of the school diary potentiates. In short, whatever dividends accruing from students working long hours, it has little to do with the enlargement of their intellectual capacities, and all to do with insulating them from a potentially malign world. In the end this robs children of the time and opportunity to be children. In other words, by over-scheduling the child, any opportunity for childhood in its traditional sense is scheduled out of existence (Agger and Shelton, 2007: 91).12 They become time-servers just like their parents. And whatever benets accrue to students working overtime, by nature and right they belong to the school. Its reputation is improved, prospective parents are impressed, and it secures positional advantage over its rivals. Thus, the imperatives of neo-liberalism are satised and the schools investment in its diary repaid. ******* In analysing the narrative architecture of the school diary and the nature of time manifested in its pages, I have argued that the revamped school diary is not strictly a time-book any longer, for it combines the functions of a diary and school handbook. As a mnemo-text it is used by parents to communicate to teachers and vice versa, as much it is by students to chronicle, organize, and retrieve their work commitments. In this respect, the diary has become a document of surveillance, used to monitor a students day-today conducts and activities, and, in so doing, satises the neo-liberalist imperatives of automization, transparency and accountability. Moreover, it does so utilizing forms of narrative architecture that make school look good in the aestheticized markets of modern education. Although school diaries clown around with time management, this only to serves to disguise and render palatable what is being advocated, which is a study regime a la Toyotatism, where childrens time increasingly defers to schooling, 24/7. Though kairological time is not entirely usurped by the chronological time of the school, it is plain that the school diarys time frames discourage its expression. If this causes students anxiety, then by utilizing the diarys self-help approaches to time management such anxiety can be mitigated. And although, as noted in the introduction, what has been analysed exists

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only on paper and might not be reected in the horological habits of actual students, failure to acquiesce to the diarys injunctions is to risk being out of joint with our times.

Notes
1. I would like to thank my students and friends Emmanuel Achelles, Diana Tilley, and manufacturers Louisa Wood and Gina Riley, who supplied me with school diaries. 2. These loci classici are not without their detractors (Glennie and Thrift, 1996; Weinrich, 2008), who have argued that time thrift predates the modern era. 3. In due recognition of this, one Canberra cafe advertises that it . . . has free Wi-Fi and power access for those who want to work while they eat (p. 11). See Canberra, 12-2.2010: 11. Undoubtedly, the advent of mobile technologies has challenged the parameters of industrial time. E-time, which is characterized by instantaneity, circumvents time-zones, individualizes time, and seems to exist outside clock, diary time. For more, see Adam (2003: 74). 4. There is now a considerable literature on the hazards of a life fastened to speed, though it is worth pointing out that such presentiments are not new (Hassan, 2003: 1; Rosa, 2009: 78). One manifestation of this counter-dromic discourse is the Slowness Movement (Honore, 2004), which advocates placing the foot on the decelerator, and returning to a more natural time, what Urry calls glacial time (2009: 195). It includes schooling within its orbit (see Agger, 2004; Rosenfield and Wise, 2000). 5. I would not like to argue that diary is alone in this respect; narratives per se are spatio-temporal constructs that compress and/or elongate time and space (Bakhtin, 1981). 6. These titles are drawn from catalogues for diaries produced by Collins in the 1960s and 1970s. 7. This process of conferring distinction only has any currency among those who feel that gold trimmings count. Others might find such trimmings crass and choose diaries with other taste signifiers. 8. I am grateful to Gina Riley for this information. 9. Concerns about the temporal efficiency of schooling are not new. When Taylorism was at its height, during the 1920s, there were attempts to extend its regimen to the classroom (Callahan, 1962). 10. One suspects free market philosophy is weaker in Australia, though this has not stopped one publisher suggesting to its potential clients that its diaries offer fantastic reach for your campaign, as the diary is used for the entire year. 11. Such working hours are not completely new but were followed by railway workers in the 1930s, who were also slaves to the clock (Cottrell, 1939). 12. These problems are not new ones. Evidence from the 1940s indicates that the New South Wales Teachers Federation was concerned that high schools were overworking their students, a fact illustrated in a photoon with the following

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caption: The Factory Act of 1833 reduced the working day of children under thirteen to forty-eight hours per week (Education: the organ of the New South Wales Public School Teachers Federation, 15 August, 1940: 303).

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