Aalborg school first to try a 4-day week in Denmark

No more blue Mondays in this educational institution

You’ve probably already heard of regional and national governments testing out the concept of 4-day work weeks as a way to boost societal well-being without sacrificing productivity. However, the staff at a school in the Danish city of Aalborg has decided that this benefit should also be taken to apply to students (well, and teachers, of course) by announcing a 4-day week experiment.

The educational institution in question is the Aalborg Cathedral School, which will be the first in Denmark to test this idea out. For this purpose, on selected Mondays, the school will remain closed extending the weekend.

The plan, however, will not apply to every single week on the curriculum, in fact, the change is taken with baby steps. Six Mondays will be selected to be off-days. And the free days won’t just come from nowhere as the summer holiday will proportionately be shortened by six days as well.

A question of rethinking the school calendar

In essence, that means that Aalborg students won’t be getting any gifted Mondays off, and we wouldn’t expect it any differently in a country where the government has recently announced the cancellation of a public holiday.

The idea here is more about breaking through the standardized pattern of when it is expected to work and study and when to rest. The board would like to better the well-being of students by providing more flexibility and a chance for them to also participate in decisions about their lives.

“I think it sounds really nice to just have a few days to relax without having to stress about assignments,” says Albert Winther Pedersen, a student at the school, speaking to TV2 News.

The new initiative will kick in during the next school year after the summer break.