In Japanese schools, the kids are the ones doing the cleaning. Not just taking out the trash, but cleaning the blackboards, mopping the floor, tidying up the desks, cleaning the bathrooms, etc.
The reasoning isn't to save money, however. It is precisely to teach them there's no such thing as work that is beneath them.
my granddad who was educated by Japanese says the crappiest stuff that made you clean like you meant it; don't read on if you don't want to be obsessed with cleaning stuff.
on how to leaving any space...
Even a bird will leave their nest in a tidy manner.
on how to clean...
treat the object you want to clean like it's your soul
> Even a bird will leave their nest in a tidy manner.
I love the Japanese ethos of Community (but don't always find myself in agreement with some of the other aphorisms, like "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.").
However, the person responsible for that gem has obviously never looked into a hawk's nest.
It's not all that different than going home and doing the cooking or the laundry. Surely you don't leave housework to your partner "because your time would be better spent elsewhere", right?
We don't think of brushing our teeth as "wading into the weeds", it's just an integral part of life for us. Cooking and laundry is (hopefully) just as much an integral part of life. Similarly, the Japanese famously don't have public trash bins everywhere and yet their streets are spotless because they consider public space cleanliness an integral part of life.
And one would hope that saying hi to people is an integral part of life too.
If I had the money I would pay for a cleaner in my house, for sure. I value cleanliness and relationships enough that of course I will do chores myself absent a cleaner, but I have no illusion that I am not trading my time and that my time would not be better spent doing other things.
> I have no illusion that I am not trading my time
I think that's kinda the point of the article. The people that ignore janitors surely are under no illusion that their time is better spent elsewhere than talking to cleaning staff. Rich parents in Dubai surely are under no illusion that it is better to hire full time nannies than to waste their time raising their own kids. The people in Wall-E surely are under no illusion that their time is better spent entertaining themselves than, well, anything.
But as the increasingly absurd examples hopefully illustrate, not everyone thinks the same way. For example, my wife firmly believes that food that is paid for is intrinsically inferior, because, all else being equal, it's not made with the same level of care as if it was made by family (and this in fact can be a particularly noticeable observation if you come from a culture that takes pride in elaborate cuisine)
We all have things that we believe implicitly are a waste of our time, perhaps because of our upbringing or some other reason, but I think the overarching message of the article is that there are some things in life that we should not be compromising on, even if we did have all the money in the world.
I went to an American private high school that also did this, although not everyone was thorough, so they had custodians clean every so often. In retrospect, it was kind of cool.
The reasoning isn't to save money, however. It is precisely to teach them there's no such thing as work that is beneath them.