Child Labor

This year at Deerfield High School students were given the chance to sign up for a course called “Tech Campus” which is a class that allows students to have hands-on experience with the field of work one is interested in. Tech Campus is not offered to students in grades lower than nine because throughout those younger years of schooling, according to schools curriculum, students should still be receiving “general” education instead of pin-pointing out a job right away. Our school system chooses not to offer Tech Campus to the younger students so that the children are able to have time during their younger years of development to gain general knowledge on aspects and useful key ideas to know in life, allowing children to lead more successful futures. However, not all school systems are designed in this way. In fact, about sixty years ago the school system was designed in an opposite manner; Instead of blocking out the early education years for general education, children would jump right into the work environment. This idea of throwing young children and having them work is a part of “child labor”. The children were removed from gaining general knowledge in school and instead became laborers working for little pay, long hours, and under bad conditions. However, this notion of “child labor” was looked upon by England as, “a good thing that the children should learn to work. We are carrying on schools to teach them to work”; In other words, the children’s life is based off of work. Being a child myself, I understand and recognize the importance of basing my education off of the general knowledge learned, and continue to learn. It is unfortunate that the child labor takes away from the ability to increase one’s knowledge about skills necessary in life.
As i was reading i came across this passage that really hit home, "Two years ago I saw 150 children working illegally at 20 minutes past 10 o'clock at night in a perfectly reputable dry goods store in the city of New York on the Saturday night before Christmas. If one of those children had stolen any small article, a doll or a penknife, the heavy hand of the law would have carried that child promptly into the Juvenile Court. But 150 children were robbed of sleep in violation of the law; and the merchant, their employer who robbed them, has never been prosecuted to this day, and will never be prosecuted."

Why have we endured being left with no official means of ready comparison of the statutes of the different states and the prosecutions of violations of the child labor law in the different states?

MLA: Florence Kelley " Obstacles to Enforcing Child Labor Laws," Annals of American History. <http://america.eb.com/america/article?articleId=386709>[Accessed February 2, 2010.]