In 1951, the Greek government carried out the first population census since the Second World War. It revealed that 30 % of school-aged children didn’t finish primary school while 15 % didn’t attend it at all (Museum of Public Education, Thermi). In total, 32.4 % of the population was illiterate. Two major reforms implemented by the governments of Konstantinos Karamanlis in 1957 and Giorgos Papandreou in 1964 profoundly changed public education by doubling its budget, increasing the number of teaching posts and making school free at all levels. They also suppressed the exams that were too often preventing people to enter secondary schools.
We can see the effects of these reforms on the region of Western Macedonia by comparing different generations of inhabitants. According to the population census of 2021, the level of illiteracy dropped at 1.19 % of local inhabitants, in the average of the European Union (Elstat – A03, 2021). It also shows that 24% of the population has a certificate from primary school. If we look at the statistics in more details, we can see that 69% of these people are 60 years old and above, which means that they were born before the education reform of 1964. Another 25.5 % of the population has a degree from general or vocational high school. Among them 42,21 % are between 50-59 years old which shows the important increase in the education level of the generation born after 1964. Since then, the number of people completing high school education has continued to rise steadily : 64,7 % of the 50-59 years old, 74,4 % of the 40-49 years old, 83 % for the 30-39 years old, 92,7 % of the 20-29 years old.
The regional development of the power generation industry has interacted with these national processes by influencing the type and length of educational pathways. In 1959, PPC started buying the mining companies that were already exploiting the lignite deposits to produce fertilizers and briquettes. This first industrialisation was still very modest and agriculture largely dominated the local economy. In the mid-1970s, the oil crisis accelerated the exploitation of lignite for energy production, seen as a guarantee of national sovereignty. This period corresponds to what Kristina Florakis, a school teacher living in Ptolemaïda1, calls “the arrival of money” when “everyone in the villages started to work at PPC” because the public company was offering stable jobs with good wages. The rise of the education level of the generations that entered the labour market in the 70’s-80’s was thus accompanied by the development of industrial employment opportunities, according to which public education institutions adapted their programs.
If we look more precisely at the 25.5 % of people who have a high school degree, we can see that 31 % of them have a vocational diploma. It is way higher than the national average: 27.5 % of Greek citizens have a high school degree but only 19.7 % of them have a professional diploma. Indeed, a vocational education is more competitive in a labour market dominated by industrial activities, as it is the case in Western Macedonia. In this region, vocational high schools have developed a range of training courses to meet the needs of lignite extraction and electricity production. It is worth noting that the transition leads to a further adaptation of the programs, which now also include specialist courses in renewable energies’ construction and operation.
The development of higher education institutions is also historically linked to the energy industry. In 2003, the University of Western Macedonia is created to integrate local departments of the University of Thessaloniki and the Institute of Technological Education, an engineering school founded in 1970 and specialised in energy production and distribution. Current curriculums at the School of Polytechnics still reflect this heritage with specialisations in “energy and non-energy raw materials”, “location and exploitation of mineral resources”, “geotechnical and environmental engineering, etc.”.
In Western Macedonia, 16.8 % of the population has a degree from a university, a polytechnic department or a vocational school, a lower number than the national average (20.11%). This can be explained firstly by the difficulty of access to education for the generations born before 1964, who are particularly important in the demographics of a region where old-age dependency ratio continues to grow (see “Energy Workers in Numbers – Demography”). Another reason is the greater competitiveness of vocational high school qualifications in a predominantly industrial labour market.
Data available in the population censuses doesn’t distinguish between the different diplomas obtained by people holding a university degree which limits the possibilities for a more detailed analysis. For instance, it is not possible to cross-reference data on gender with the type of degree obtained. However, if we look at the statistics for the high school level, gender seems to leave its mark on individual educational paths. Indeed, if 45.69 % of the people holding a high school diploma are women, only 21 % of them followed a vocational course compared with 35.5 % of men. The greater and earlier specialisation of men reveals the role played by gender in the economy of energy production.
The geographer Theodora Vetta notices that “gendered family plans” are common in Western Macedonia and imply for male children to “seek a permanent position at PPC” while females are allowed to pursue higher education (Vetta, 2020: 33). In the region, women are 18.2 % to hold a university degree, slightly more than men who are 15.4%. However, this gender-gap (2.8 %) is not much higher than the national one (2.15 % – 21.15 % of women hold a degree from higher education against 19 % of men). Therefore, while some family strategies tend to favour women’s access to higher education over men’s, this does not seem to be the main trend.
A more powerful dynamic is the division of productive and reproductive labour within the family. Traditionally, the role of breadwinner devolves to the man while the role of care-taker falls to the woman. As I will show in more details in further publications, this economic system is reinforced by the industry of energy production: for instance, work in the mines is based on day and night shifts which are difficult to combine with caring for children and grandparents. In Western Macedonia, the number of women working exclusively at home is thus higher than in the rest of Greece: in 2021, they were 28% in the prefecture of Kozani against 23% on the national average (Elstat – B02, 2021)2.
Eventually, some of them have to find a job, either to compensate for their spouse’s loss of earning or in the event of a divorce or a widowhood. Their general education, their lack of professional experience and the domestic burdens they still have to bear make them uncompetitive on the labour market. Many women thus take evening classes at adult education centres to acquire diplomas fitting the evolving needs of the labour market. Elektra for instance, who divorced in 2006, cumulates licences of electrician, security guard and excavator operator. Yet she has never applied to a job in these male-dominated sectors: she explains that she didn’t learn to use tools and machines as a child. Her lack of confidence in her technical abilities was then reinforced by an essentially theoretical training that did not prepare her for the reality of work. Other interviewees also mention discriminations limiting the employment of women, often considered less capable than men.
Women’s limited career prospects in the context of a highly gendered industrial monoculture explain why they specialise less and later. In Western Macedonia, the combination of a particular economic structure and gender roles rooted in family strategies seems to determine to a large extent the educational pathways of individuals.
1 All the names of the participants have been changed to ensure their anonymity.
2 Before 2021, Greek population censuses mentioned the category “Domestic activities” among the “Non-economically active”. In 2021, the category disappeared. I obtained these figures by subtracting students and pensioners from the number of non-economically active people of working age. To be able to compare them to previous population censuses, I focused on the geographical unit they had in common: the prefecture. Finally, it is worth noticing that the percentage of men in this category is 0%. This does not mean that men never stay home to take care of their family but that the number of men that do so is too small to appear statistically.
Sources
Elstat, Population Census – B02, 2021. URL : Β02. Μόνιμος Πληθυσμός κατά φύλο και κατάσταση ασχολίας. Δήμοι
Elstat, Population Census – A03, 2021. URL : Α03. Μόνιμος Πληθυσμός κατά φύλο, ομάδες ηλικιών και επίπεδο εκπαίδευσης. Περιφέρειες
Eurostat, Production of lignite in the EU – statistics, 2023.
Luc Christiaensen and Céline Ferré, Just Coal Transition in Western Macedonia, Greece – Insights from the Labour Market, World Bank, October 2020.
Museum of Public Education, “1950 – 1967: εκπαιδευτικό έλλειμμα και προσπάθειες μεταρρύθμισης”, Thermi. URL: https://midepth.gr/1950-1967-εκπαιδευτικό-έλλειμμα-και-προσπάθ/
Theodora Vetta, “Bondage unemployment and intra-class tensions in Greek energy restructuring”, in Susana Narotzky (ed.), Grassroots Economies: Living with Austerity in Southern Europe, London, Pluto Press, 2020.