If they don’t turn up to school, it doesn’t make the slightest difference

Friday, November 15th, 2019

You often hear people lament that children should be allowed to roam free. Ed West’s radical proposal is that child labour should be reintroduced:

But it only sounds radical because we associate child labour with past times of extreme poverty and poor working conditions. For my generation it’s Rik from The Young Ones castigating an elderly woman about the “good old days” when you had “four-year-old kiddies digging coal”. And those days were indeed awful. Dan Jackson’s brilliant recent book The Northumbrians recalled the heart-breaking tragedy of the 1862 Hartley Mining Disaster where the bodies of young boys were found with their tiny arms around their brothers.

Not even an ironic reactionary like me would lament the decline of infant mortality and workplace fatalities brought about by health and safety legislation. We obviously wouldn’t allow children to do dangerous work in factories today, and many of the most horrific roles once done by kids are obsolete anyway.

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But for children a bit older, the working environment allows them to interact with adults, adopt adult social norms and learn skills when their brain is rapidly absorbing information. They could also earn money at a time in life they really want it.

I suspect that a lot of teenage crime in London exists because boys reach an age when they want disposable income but there’s no way for them to legally earn it. They’re also mentally and physically under-stimulated by schoolwork they know brings them little tangible benefit. (This is arguably more acute among boys because they’re generally more goal-driven, respond when stakes are high, and easily give up when they’re not). Instead, during those crucial developmental years, they often learn negative behaviour through frustration and drift, so that by the time they’re finally allowed to enter the labour force, they’re already unsuited to it.

At the moment, almost half a million people aged 16-24 are unemployed, but many might not be, if they’d been allowed to start work a bit earlier — with a lower minimum wage. Experience would make them more attractive to employers; it would also get them in the habit of work, so they’d be more likely to adjust to working quickly and stick to it.

Prolonged education also cuts adolescents off from wider society. One of the worst aspects of British society — and where it contrasts poorly with Catholic cultures like Italy or Ireland (still, just about) — is that we have a great deal of generational separation. Young people benefit from working and socialising among those older than them, not only because they’re a calming influence but because they can subtly instruct them on how to behave.

Working young helps insulate children from one of the biggest pitfalls of modern life: extended or even permanent adolescence, which happens when people learn responsibility too late. It also helps a person form a place in a society. Not having enough money is pretty much the worst thing in the world — and reducing poverty should be the central “social justice” aim of governments — but not having a role or purpose is almost as bad.

Teenage boys like to feel needed. This really hit me a few years back when during an unexpected snowfall — there hadn’t been snow in London for well over a decade — all the cars in our area were stuck, and the drivers, many of them mothers with children, stranded. It was obvious that the boys on their way home from the nearby secondary school loved all this — for once, wider society actually needed them.

Having a job, going to an office and earning money — and with it the opportunity to work, and earn, even more — gives teenagers a role. If they don’t turn up for work, the company suffers; if they don’t turn up to school, it doesn’t make the slightest difference except for the purpose of government statistics.

Comments

  1. Harry Jones says:

    Productive work: good.
    Making money: good.
    Working for the man: not so good.

    If they’re going to learn to be wage slaves, they can be brainwashed to servility just as well in the school system. Give us child entrepreneurship, not child labor. They’re not too young to freelance if they have ability. (Those without ability are a loss no matter what we do.)

    Wage slavery is really just a state of mind, as I said in a thread at Blog for Chumps. But a state of mind doesn’t just come from nowhere. It’s inculcated.

  2. Someone says:

    It’s really time to let those who can stop education at the 8th grade and go to work part time and continue an education in other ways. High school is another artificial environment where most and especially boys would be better off learning a skill or working toward an associates where they are either fully employable somewhat at 18 or go to university.

    Sure, I’m glad I was not digging ditches scrimping an existence, but the public school systems encourage delayed adulthood just by the nature of the system.

    Harry above is right about working for the man, but that would still be more beneficial than sitting around school since they offer no vocational training programs for the tax dollars spent.

  3. T. Beholder says:

    But for children a bit older, the working environment allows them to interact with adults, adopt adult social norms and learn skills when their brain is rapidly absorbing information. They could also earn money at a time in life they really want it.

    Which is exactly why this notion would be about as easy to actually implement as permanently closing all public schools.

  4. Someone says:

    “Which is exactly why this notion would be about as easy to actually implement as permanently closing all public schools.”

    That’s the truth! Besides, this could possibly create a majority population that knows how to do something for themselves even in adverse conditions. But the powers prefer some level of helplessness or incompetence.

  5. CVLR says:

    John Taylor Gatto

    John Taylor Gatto

    John Taylor Gatto

    Every conversation about school should end with

    John Taylor Gatto

    John Taylor Gatto

    John Taylor Gatto

  6. McChuck says:

    Children should not begin formal schooling until age 8. Boys, especially, need to simply run around and play outside. Parents can quite easily teach children the basics of the reading and simple math. (Well, they could if they ever learned it themselves. Which many don’t in 13 years of modern “education”.)

    Schooling should end after 5 years, at age 13-14. You can teach a child everything they really need to know in that time, if you cut out the extraneous bran washing and time wasting. Older children learn much more quickly. Especially if you haven’t already taught them that they are failures and humiliated them.

    After that, teens should begin formal apprenticeships, with appropriate part-time schooling and basic work in their fields. There should be a round-robin testing and application process during the first few months, where students are roughly fitted to their talents and capabilities.

    No more than 10% of the population should be allowed to enter a college preparatory course of schooling.

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