Exploiting Children
When John Holt wrote Escape From Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children in 1971, one of the many controversial issues he raised in that book is the right for children to earn their own money for their own purposes. GWS continued to raise this issue by publishing news reports and first-hand accounts about children doing real work as part of their homeschooling. I am working on the next set of GWS issues for publication and I rediscovered a wonderful conversation about children and work that ran in several consecutive issues. At that time Susannah Sheffer, the editor of GWS, was also working through the letters of John Holt that became collected in A Life Worth Living: Selected Letters of John Holt. This is a piece of writing by John that appeared only in GWS (it didn’t get into the final copy of the book). Susannah’s introduction opens this piece.
Talking about children in the workplace can be tricky because we still live, as Seymour Papert said in GWS # 65. “in the shadow of the Nineteenth-Century exploitation” of children in sweatshops and fields. So sensitive are we to the possibility of child labor in the exploitative sense that we’ve made it difficult, and sometimes impossible, for children to work at all, even when they want or need to. The following piece of unpublished writing by John Holt may help clarify some of these issues:
. . . I’m the first to admit that child labor as we knew it in the Nineteenth Century, and as we still see it in some of our migrant labor camps, is inhuman. But what made it inhuman is not just that these poor, delicate, angelic children were doing it. It was inhuman for everybody who did it. It is inhuman for anybody to work sixteen hours a day in a coal mine, I don’t care what age he is. It is inhuman for anybody to work for long hours in the hot sun in stooped labor, as they do in so many of the industrial farms of our southwest. It is inhuman to do hard work for grossly insufficient wages, to be condemned to live in dreadful conditions. It is inhuman for adults as well as children.
What is bad about the child labor of earlier times or some parts of our own times is that the children were conscripted into labor. As I am opposed to school conscription, I am equally opposed to work conscription. Not only that, but they weren’t even able to keep the money they earned. They were pressed into service because of the miserable poverty of their parents, and their money was instantly taken from them. I don’t approve of any of this, and I have made it perfectly clear in my writing. I think it is a disgrace that in a country as rich as this we have the amount of poverty we do, and I think that for the very health of our soul and our political system we must and should make a political decision, and it is a political decision, to end poverty, exactly as the Scandinavian countries and other nations far poorer than we are in resources have ended it. But this is a political decision that calls for political, social, and economic measures. The countries that have ended poverty have not done it by messing around in the schools and by making people go to school longer. It is a cowardly evasion of our responsibility, and a most cruel deception of the poor, to pretend that the dreadful poverty that we have in this country is an educational or school problem that can be changed by things done in schools. I want to create a situation in which each child will have no reason for working except that he wants the experience of working or wants to earn some money which he will keep and use for his own purposes, and anything I say about the right of children to work has to be seen in that context.
