In this photo the shame of child labor in the United States looks like a distant thing, like it belongs to an era now long gone. And in our country most would agree that exploitative child labor should belong to a category that includes dinosaurs and mammoths and maps of a world with flat edges: gone forever, replaced by evolution or because now we know better. Though there are still exceptions in the United States, such as migrant work circuits and dozens of unethical workplaces across the country, mostly child labor is a thing of the past and illegal where it does exist. Children are now required to be in school, away from the greed of workplaces that would exploit children for profit.
There was a time when labor organizations worked with lawmakers to protect the interests of companies to exploit children in the work place. The country began to challenge and change child labor practices in 1906, but it wasn't until 1938 that law was passed to end child labor (that passed through the Supreme Court in 1941) and is still in place today. It took 35 years for the country to successfully address (through legislation) the shameful, dangerous, exploitative practice of putting children to work in mines, mills, factories, and fields. Child labor became a de facto slave labor, as children denied education were denied mobility through education and opportunity: they were denied the middle class which would really begin to swell after the passage of the law, World War II, the GI Bill, and a national focus on providing opportunity for social and economic mobility, rather than limiting it.
In the decades it took to abolish child labor, corporate interests and lawmakers opposing child labor laws decried that the government was overreaching in its attempt to control industry or state rights, or that Communists were behind the effort to control the American workplace. The American public is always eager for that kind of boogeyman, and corporate interests gave them as many as they needed. They were able to stall progress for almost three cycles of K-12 education, more than an entire generation of children. The real boogeyman wasn't social progress, however. The real boogeyman was greed.
As a public school teacher I see a new kind of exploitation of children, with greed as the same root cause. Today children labor at school very directly due to the companies who profit from public education and the lawmakers and lobbyists they control as shills tightening a vice grip of legislation, a misguided/misrepresented assessment agenda, and a campaign of pubic opinion to identify teachers and liberal public school agendas as the villain. It's not Communism this time, but public education as a public good has become public enemy number one, and it's still motivated by companies who want to pay as little as possible to squeeze out as much profit as possible.
It turns out that greed hasn't changed much in the last century, and neither has the strategy to control the condition of the "labor" of children through legislation. With funding from private interests such as ALEC, lawmakers across the country have locked in processes and regulations and mandates that direct money away from local control and public good, and into the pockets of adults who have private and personal interests. This is especially true here in Michigan which operates more "for profit" schools than any other state.
But who benefits from profit-driven competition in public schools? Local schools and communities? No, they are having to cut vital services and programs such as art and music to make room in the budget for testing services. Local families? No, children have fewer opportunities for upward mobility in our economy than at any time since before the Great Depression, and education is no longer a guarantee of success as it was when America built the middle class we so claim to love. Children? No more than they did than when our economy handed them helmets and told them to crawl in a mine for ten hours a day. So who benefits? As always, follow the money: both where it comes from, and then where it returns: ALEC, Pearson, Koch Industries, CTB/McGraw-Hill, and many others.
Winston Churchill once said that the United States will "do the right thing once it has exhausted all other possibilities." It took us 35 years to fix the problem last time. We can't waste that many futures taking that long to do the right thing this time. Today public education looks more like the photo from the early 1900's than it should. But we fixed the problem of the exploitation of child labor for profit once before. I think we're going to have to do it again.
