quote:Originally posted by King of Men: There are certainly people who can benefit from a liberal education but do not seek it out on their own; but they are few relative to the number who don't benefit and are forced into it.
I can agree with you here, and yet maintain that overall it's worth it to have liberal education be the status quo, for the benefit of the relatively few who will profit (since the gains are so great).
However, I don't agree. I think we get a distorted picture because students take all sorts of classes, many of which they don't like. But in my experience almost every college student has some subject they become passionate about. They may not all like my class, but invariably they find someone whose class speaks to them.
As to whether mass enrollment dumbs down the process for the better students, I don't think that effect is very pronounced if it really exists at all. In the absence of any actual scientific data, all we have here is your anecdotal word against mine.
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The image that comes to mind for many people when the subject of child labor is broached is the chimney sweeps and workhouses of Victorian England. And while that may be an excessively sentimental analogy, it's not entirely without merit, either.
The jobs kids and young teenagers would be qualified for are mostly in the fields where we see the most abuses in the adult work force- "off the clock" overtime, pressure not to report workplace injuries, unqualified or unable people being made to work complex machinery or lift heavy loads- not to mention more straight-forward matters like questionable terminations and sexual harrassment. To add children or teenagers to those workforces is to assume that they will know how to react to potential pressures that adults often can't handle, to their substantial harm.
(This is speaking as someone who worked as a teenager at a paint store where stripping chemicals were eating through some of the boxes in the back room- OSHA would have had a field day.)
It's quite possibly true that the public school system should have better vocational tracks for those who are not college-bound. Simply releasing those students into the workplace wholesale and pretending that it's doing them a favor is a load of Spartan nonsense.
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quote: The image that comes to mind for many people when the subject of child labor is broached is the chimney sweeps and workhouses of Victorian England.
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Point of order, no child can or should have a paper route. You have to have a car, the route covers several miles, you have to be in line at 2 am, and the route complete by 6 am. The days of the kid on a bike throwing after day break is long gone.
I could see the state lowering some of their child labor laws, but I agree that this woman's bill is not the way to do it.
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Blayne Bradley
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quote:Originally posted by Sterling: The image that comes to mind for many people when the subject of child labor is broached is the chimney sweeps and workhouses of Victorian England. And while that may be an excessively sentimental analogy, it's not entirely without merit, either.
The jobs kids and young teenagers would be qualified for are mostly in the fields where we see the most abuses in the adult work force- "off the clock" overtime, pressure not to report workplace injuries, unqualified or unable people being made to work complex machinery or lift heavy loads- not to mention more straight-forward matters like questionable terminations and sexual harrassment. To add children or teenagers to those workforces is to assume that they will know how to react to potential pressures that adults often can't handle, to their substantial harm.
(This is speaking as someone who worked as a teenager at a paint store where stripping chemicals were eating through some of the boxes in the back room- OSHA would have had a field day.)
It's quite possibly true that the public school system should have better vocational tracks for those who are not college-bound. Simply releasing those students into the workplace wholesale and pretending that it's doing them a favor is a load of Spartan nonsense.
That's definitely an angle I haven't considered.
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quote:Neither is widespread literacy or a postindustrial economic prosperity, so.
And this affects my point how? You're picking nits, and not bothering to understand my post.
quote:Not really -- the school can decide that a student can't play school sports unless they're passing all their classes
I didn't say it was the same, I said it was similar. Obviously the school's sphere of influence is limited, but in the case of working papers, it is extended outside the school. This doesn't alter my point at all. Schools will often refuse working papers to a 14 year old (or older) child if their grades are not high enough.
There is an unnatural emphasis placed on academic education, and on-the-job education isn't recognized. Kids decide that school isn't for them, as I said, between the ages of 11 and 13. We should be looking at that from the perspective of what is normal in the context of human history. At this point, they want to go out into the world and be independent. That's part of human nature at that age. Getting a job can serve both purposes, provided it's done right.
Say a kid apprentices for a flooring installer. The boss isn't paying him (or not paying him much) and so, can bring him over and have him calculate area of a floorspace, help estimate materials for a job, and write up a quote including materials, labor and tax. In today's world, that won't happen until the kid is at least 16, and more likely 18, but we're teaching that kind of math in 6th and 7th grade. And the common question is "when am I ever going to use this stuff?" But as adults, we often wish we'd understood this when we were kids.
Even if a kid is working at 14 years old, (the minimum) an employer wants to maximize their value at $8 an hour, so they have them do something that they can already do, rather than taking the time to teach them something new, or especially something that meets an academic standard.
We either pay for education, or we expect to be paid for work. There's no middle ground.
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Blayne Bradley
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Japanese schools [seem to] usually forbid their students from having partime jobs.
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quote:Originally posted by AvidReader: Point of order, no child can or should have a paper route. You have to have a car, the route covers several miles, you have to be in line at 2 am, and the route complete by 6 am. The days of the kid on a bike throwing after day break is long gone.
I had a paper route from 14-16.
The papers had to be delivered by 7am on weekdays, later on weekends. The papers were delivered to me by a truck and dropped off right in front of my house. And since I lived in an area with a lot of apartment and condominium complexes, my route actually only covered a small geographic area (as did most routes around me). Granted, this is 15 years ago now, but the point is your comments are only true on an area specific basis.
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A carrier owns the paper route. He can certainly subcontract out if he wants. If that guy decides to split his route up into little pieces and finds a fleet of reliable kids, I could see it working. But the child does not have a paper route or a formal job. He's probably getting paid under the table by some guy; I'd be shocked if the carrier provided the kids with a W2 or worried about taxes. Labor laws would only apply if anybody got caught.
As for the time thing, my husband get complaints from customers if they don't have their paper by 4 or 5. 6 am is definitely company standard, and I'd be shocked if it's not industry standard these days. That's awful early to have a 14 year old up and running around in the dark alone on foot or on bike.
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Blayne Bradley
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Reminds me of the anime Kanamemo where they have a bunch of girls of wildly different ages from 11 to 17 working for the same paper route company. They had to get up around 4-5 am, be done around 7 and then (most of them) had some sort of school or job right after that.
And they all lived together in their office building, which doubled as some kind of 2story loft/office building thing.
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I had a paper route, but it was an evening paper. It was supposed to be delivered by 6:00 PM. It was a perfect after-school job.
It also helped that I had four younger siblings that could fill in for me (and for money) if needed.
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quote:Originally posted by Strider: Granted, this is 15 years ago now, but the point is your comments are only true on an area specific basis.
Maybe, but not really. In rare circumstances only. Doing paper routes to houses is an ugly, unrewarding, dangerous job for mostly desperate people, and is almost always inappropriate for kids. There might be a handful of jobs for weeklies and evening deliveries that are not handled by carrier truck, but it's not much.
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*shrug* Even I had a weekly paper route. Granted, it was quite a while ago. But it wasn't that bad.
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The conditions of working a paper route vary wildly from place to place. The two places that I grew up had fantastic routes for kids. Where I live now doesn't.
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quote:Originally posted by mr_porteiro_head: The conditions of working a paper route vary wildly from place to place. The two places that I grew up had fantastic routes for kids. Where I live now doesn't.
They've also changes a lot over TIME too. The same route that I did as a teenager on my bike after school where the papers had to be on the doorstep by 5:00PM is now a route done by car where the paper has to be in the driveway by 6:00AM.
Paper routes in my home town used to be a great job for kids... but not anymore.
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quote: The image that comes to mind for many people when the subject of child labor is broached is the chimney sweeps and workhouses of Victorian England.
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I jog early in the morning while the carriers are doing their typical routes. It's usually done between the hours of 3-5 AM (with most places needing to be done before 4, I think). It is not a good job.
The kind of paper routes that were suitable in any way for young people are, for the most part, gone. Yeah, I'm sure a lot of people remember them from something like a decade ago. We're now in the rapidly waning years of the newspaper as an institution, and kid-friendly routes during daylight hours have been replaced by bleary-eyed economic desperates, often tolerating non-covered wear and tear to their aging vehicles, to deliver bulk quantities for a pittance.
People really do often mention paper routes as a reason why it should be okay for underage kids to work. It's kind of interesting, because they're legitimately unaware of the ways in which newspaper delivery has changed, or how employment in general has changed. Paper routes for kids are no longer widely available. Even things like bagging jobs at supermarkets are usually filled completely by adults, at the supermarkets' preference.
There's still babysitting and dog-walking and a few other limited options (along with the less-savory, exploitative ones), but for the most part the world we live in now is one in which general education takes supreme priority and it is phenomenally unwise for a parent to let a kid exchange their focus in general education for what early jobs are available. Law should not be changing right now to encourage otherwise.
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: ...kid-friendly routes during daylight hours have been replaced by bleary-eyed economic desperates, often tolerating non-covered wear and tear to their aging vehicles, to deliver bulk quantities for a pittance.
The pay's not great, but the tax write offs are supposed to be pretty good. Mileage, supplies purchased, it's all a business expense.
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Most people who have today's paper route jobs say that the tax situation is not good for them, especially considering most are signing you up as an independent contractor. You still eat wear and tear and maintenance costs. At least, that's the norm on all big paper routes for newspapers that are effectively in the process of being harvested. Could be different than I think, though.
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quote:Originally posted by kmbboots: But Samprimary, we need more gammas, deltas, and epsilons!
Given that we have in fact got gammas, deltas, and epsilons, what do you want done with them? Please observe that the answer cannot be "put them in beta jobs"; by construction they can't do them. I assume you're not willing to put them in extermination camps, either. Nor is education the answer. Education can make a gamma into a better-informed gamma; it can't turn him into a beta. Besides which, for any given quantity of education, the beta benefits more than the gamma does, because he is smarter; consequently education increases the gap, it does not decrease it. (This is a common feature of many technologies. Technology is akin to leverage: It multiplies your strength by some factor, say ten. So if the strengths used to be 10 and 11, now they are 100 and 110, and the gap has increased tenfold.)
What does that leave, if not some sort of productive jobs that they can do? The gamma who repairs plumbing isn't, perhaps, as acquainted with Shakespeare as you would like everyone to be; but he won't get to that point anyway, no matter how miserable you make him with bad grades and repeated explanations. But he has dignity and financial independence, unlike the miserable failed-beta high-school dropout you want to make of him.
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quote:Nor is education the answer. Education can make a gamma into a better-informed gamma; it can't turn him into a beta.
That's misinformed to a serious degree. Education has severely shifted (and continues to shift) where we place the boundaries between these conceptualizations of the educated grades of people. Those things which education has manifestly been the solution for — such as ensuring near-universal literacy in a postmodern economy — show the weakness of the idea.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Law should not be changing right now to encourage otherwise.
The reasons listed here as to why a paper route is no longer appropriate for a child have much to do with the fact that as a result of labor laws, it's not advantageous for the newspaper company to hire children. So when they hired adults, the situation changed, and the afternoon paper became the morning paper. Changing the laws back now may not result in the return to afternoon papers, but if labor laws are changed to allow more flexibility for teens to work undoubtedly changes will occur.
I disagree that we should not be changing the labor laws right now, because as a former remedial math teacher, it's my opinion that a lot of those kids would benefit from having a job. There are lots of jobs unskilled workers can do that aren't dangerous. My grandmother had a job folding cardboard boxes. Most basic assembly jobs aren't particularly dangerous, but they've been shipped overseas because of the U.S. minimum wage.
I made an argument in my previous post, which you obviously didn't read, and I don't see a point to copying and pasting it here. But what it comes down to is that your statement is a bald faced assertion that ignores the value that can be had if labor laws were changed. Not scrapped, but changed.
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You don't need to change labor laws for a 15-year-old kid to fold boxes for eight hours a week.
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Imagine, just for a moment, I read both and don't see how reveals any real weaknesses in my opinion.
Part of your last post:
quote:We should be looking at that from the perspective of what is normal in the context of human history.
And a part of a post before that:
quote:Historically speaking, children began to work around the age of 11 to 13, whether this was with the family business or an apprenticeship, or just menial labor. The current requirement that all children should attend secondary education is actually pretty arbitrary, and while it feels like the norm to us, because it has existed for our lifetimes, it actually isn't normal in the context of history.
My response to either:
quote:Neither is widespread literacy or a postindustrial economic prosperity [normal in the context of human history], so.
The "perspective of what is normal in the context of human history" remains a poor judge of what activities should be encouraged for children in today's world, since the life and future potential opportunities of a kid in a modernized economy are so phenomenally different from what it used to be. Even things as basic as a literate population generally expected to live past their mid-40s is completely, almost unfathomably alien to this normal context of human history, where few people were literate or existed in an economic system which put much requirement on basic literacy or math.
It remains a stupid idea for a parent to let a kid exchange their focus in general education for what early jobs are available. Whether or not the law permits it. If we are talking about bald assertions of potential value for systems, what can't be missing is what you lose when you stack the legal permissibility of 'easy outs' for a school system which is already failing too many children.
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OK, so you read the same part you read last time, and still haven't bothered to finish the post.
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You remind me of some of my students. Read as little as possible, and then give a contrived answer based on partial information, while avoiding the part you don't like.
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quote:Nor is education the answer. Education can make a gamma into a better-informed gamma; it can't turn him into a beta.
That's misinformed to a serious degree. Education has severely shifted (and continues to shift) where we place the boundaries between these conceptualizations of the educated grades of people. Those things which education has manifestly been the solution for — such as ensuring near-universal literacy in a postmodern economy — show the weakness of the idea.
The ability to puzzle out c-a-t CAT while moving your finger across the page does not equal actual literacy. Most people cannot read, as you and I think of the term. Education has given the appearance of universal literacy without the substance.
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quote:Originally posted by Glenn Arnold: ... There are lots of jobs unskilled workers can do that aren't dangerous. My grandmother had a job folding cardboard boxes. Most basic assembly jobs aren't particularly dangerous, but they've been shipped overseas because of the U.S. minimum wage.
This is an entirely different issue, no? If the issue is the minimum wage, then lower the minimum wage. Changing the labour laws in order to hire kids that can be paid less than minimum wage seems an awfully roundabout way of doing things.
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quote:Originally posted by Glenn Arnold: You remind me of some of my students. Read as little as possible, and then give a contrived answer based on partial information, while avoiding the part you don't like.
Boy, you're in a mood today I guess.
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Porter: I went to college at 15, and supported myself at the time by working. (My family was poor, so I actually started "working" at 13 under the table, and then 14 legally.) At no point did I find child labor laws to be excessively inconvenient once I hit 14 years old.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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So your experience is very different than mine. That does not change my experience at all. Every place I tried to apply to told me the same thing -- they weren't allowed to hire anybody under 16.
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In my limited experience, a lot of people don't want to hire anyone without a driver's licence, which means 16.
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quote:Originally posted by mr_porteiro_head: So your experience is very different than mine. That does not change my experience at all. Every place I tried to apply to told me the same thing -- they weren't allowed to hire anybody under 16.
by law? Or by company policy?
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Most people cannot read, as you and I think of the term. Education has given the appearance of universal literacy without the substance.
I even find that otherwise intelligent people who are literate still have awful reading comprehension.
Me: Specifically not this. I know you're going to assume this, but that. Them: Well, your position on this is stupid. Me: *beats head against wall*
Though I think that comes down to actually caring about someone else's position instead of your own. If you assume I believe one thing, why bother listen to me say that I believe something else entirely? And no education I've ever seen will fix that one.
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Has anyone considered the logistics of child labor?
Where would they work? I don't mean in what type of jobs. I mean location.
They can not drive. It is no coincidence that the driving age and the usual employment age are the same.
So that gives them 4 ways to get to work.
1) They can walk--or ride a bike. This is simple and neat, except for two things. Your job used to be within walking distance for "much of human history." You worked on the farm where you lived, or you moved into the home of the person you were training from. Later, factory towns built houses within walking distance from their factories. Cities were created as houses built around jobs. Then we invented the Commute. How many places of business are in walking distance from your house.
I live in a small town, not a suburb, so I am lucky. I have a hospital, a doctor's office, a used car lot, a music store, and a tattoo parlor to send my son too.
Of course during bad weather such walkers and bike riders are more likely to be absent. This makes them unreliable workers.
2) Parents can drive them. Except in today's society both parents are usually working. Who can afford to take time off to shuttle their kids to and from work? Again, even the best intentioned child has to consider this mode of transport as--unreliable. Their bosses will.
3) The company will pick them up and drop them off. I can imagine the local amusement park sending a bus to the school to pick up a group of workers, except that amusement park will be wasting most of the money they are saving by hiring cheaper child labor on transportation costs and insurance for that transportation.
That leaves only a few businesses, usually small businesses, that would have the desire to play shuttle service to its employees. It will cost them.
This gets into the whole abuse problem. We've worked hard over the last 50 years placing requirements on the people who spend time with our children. Finger printing, background checks, and educational courses are required for all teachers, youth ministers, coaches, and others who take care of our children. I don't imagine we are going to require employers to do the same. That is just more red tape. In fact, I imagine the mere threat of a lawsuit due to child abuse may convince companies to take some precautions, but more likely they'll have the kids family sign waivers promising not to sue as part of the hiring process.
Or they won't hire kids to begin with.
But those few who don't--think about this. Its every parent of a teen girls favorite fear...having her boyfriend "run out of gas" miles from home--and having her have to "put out or walk home."
Except now the threat is "put out or be fired and walk home."
When I was in my 20s I applied for a job. Part of the interview had me traveling with another worker. We took his car and drove 30 miles away from my car to do some sales. When I realized where I was and that I was totally dependent on this stranger for my safety, it scared me. I couldn't imagine a 14 year old in the same situation.
4) Work at home. Yep, there are 10,000 opportunities to be found on the internet for stuffing envelopes, forwarding emails, and doing piece work of one kind or another.
Admittedly most of them are cons where you pay for supplies only to discover that the supplies cost more than the finished product. Or that it will take about three years of hard work to get to the point of profitability, except the company closes and changes names first.
But there are some jobs you can do from home. Nice small home factories where you are paid pennies to do simple production. Some how, I don't see sitting at the family dining room table for hours at a time as a big draw for the usual 14 year old.
"Let see, I want a new car at 16. Say, $25,000. At 2 cents per envelope stuffed, I need to stuff 500,000 envelopes. That's 250,000 envelopes a year. Considering about 250 days a year when I will work, cause I'm not a math person so I make it easy on the math, that's 1000 envelopes a day. One, two, three...maybe I'll finish up after a quick game of Mario Karts."
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I don't know whether it is amusing or sad that public transit is evidentally so crummy in your area that it can be totally overlooked when we're discussing low wage jobs Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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I knew there was a 5th option I wanted to discuss. Public Transportation. The cost of getting to work would have to be deducted from the take home pay of the worker. That leaves taxis out, as being to expensive.
So you have Bus and Train. Both of these are getting cut backs from cash strapped governments, so employment could be curtailed at any moment. That is assuming the bus stop is within walking distance of a bus stop or train station, and that your home is likewise in walking distance of either.
The only place this is likely to happen is in cities. Suburbs and rural locals will not be covered.
Even then, if you are three blocks from a bus stop, and the job opening is within 4 blocks of a bus stop, you can take a bus to work. Millions do on a daily basis.
But kids alone on the bus are possible victims, and bad weather makes walking to and from the bus less likely.
What you have is a situation where some companies might consider hiring a juvenile worker at a cut rate, if they are near public transportation, and enough prospective kids are near public transportation, and that public transportation is reliable and timely. (If the bus arrives 2 hours before the work opens, or 2 hours after the shift starts, it doesn't help much).
Posts: 1941 | Registered: Feb 2003
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quote:Originally posted by mr_porteiro_head: So your experience is very different than mine. That does not change my experience at all. Every place I tried to apply to told me the same thing -- they weren't allowed to hire anybody under 16.
by law? Or by company policy?
My understand was by law. Of course, this was over 20 years ago, and I do not remember exactly what was said.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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quote:I don't know whether it is amusing or sad that public transit is evidentally so crummy in your area that it can be totally overlooked...
I've lived in six cities and four towns in my life; three of those cities would qualify as "large." And I would say that public transportation would be adequate for commuters in precisely two of them.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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quote:Originally posted by Mucus: I don't know whether it is amusing or sad that public transit is evidentally so crummy in your area that it can be totally overlooked when we're discussing low wage jobs
Where I live, we don't have even a single bus. So, public transit is completely non-existent here. If you can get 10 miles to the big city, you can find a bus. Posts: 2223 | Registered: Mar 2008
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Seriously? "Kids" of 14 or 15 are possible victims if they take a public bus and can't walk a few blocks or bike a mile or two in bad weather? Coddling youth in America has gotten that bad?
Dude, I'm so glad I was never your child. By the time I hit middle school I was responsible for getting myself wherever I needed to go, including school, after-school activities, and friends' houses. My mom could sometimes drive me to school in the morning if she didn't have to be at work early. Otherwise I would ride my bike the 3.5 miles to school, or catch the local bus, which meant walking about half a mile on either end. And I'd do the same thing on the way home. It sucked a bit when it was raining (which it does a LOT of in the northern most part of CA), but, you know, it was fine and I was fine. The idea of not letting teenagers be free-range like that is pretty appalling, to be honest.
In high school I switched to mostly biking everywhere, including the part-time job I was finally able to get when I turned 16. The suburbs are *full* of retail places for teens to work at - are there seriously many places that don't have a shopping center within a couple of miles?
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: I've lived in six cities and four towns in my life; three of those cities would qualify as "large." And I would say that public transportation would be adequate for commuters in precisely two of them.
Several votes for sad then.
Anecdotally, things are marginally better up here. Out of places I've lived, two small cities and one medium sized one, the public transit is adequate, excellent, and poor respectively. But even in the "adequate" small city, we still have white collar IT and finance (insurance) people on the bus, let alone low wage.
Still a far cry from a proper transit system, globally speaking, but the idea that people "have" to drive to work, at all, is just sad.
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Most of my time growing up was in Hong Kong, were you couldn't get a job or a driver's license until you were 18. The public transportation was absolutely fantastic. My father currently lives in Hong Kong and he rides the bus to work every single day rather than drive.
When I went to school I had the option of riding the bus or walking home if I missed the afterschool bus. Even if I had lived far away, procuring transportation home would not have been difficult. Heck, there were times when I got done hanging out with my friends at 1:00am, buses were no longer running, and taxis mostly kept to the more populous parts of the island. I roller bladed home quite a few times in those instances.
Here in Utah, public transportation isn't nearly as good as it could be, but then again, pretty much everybody lives very close to the freeway. With a bike and a bus, I'm betting you could get anywhere between Provo and Salt Lake City within an hour.
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quote:With a bike and a bus, I'm betting you could get anywhere between Provo and Salt Lake City within an hour.
It's more like triple that.
eta: On second thought, triple is way too generous.
eta2: Which isn't too surprising -- It can take 45 minutes easy to drive from place to place (depending on the place) within Utah Valley itself.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Most people cannot read, as you and I think of the term. Education has given the appearance of universal literacy without the substance.
I even find that otherwise intelligent people who are literate still have awful reading comprehension.
Me: Specifically not this. I know you're going to assume this, but that. Them: Well, your position on this is stupid. Me: *beats head against wall*
Though I think that comes down to actually caring about someone else's position instead of your own. If you assume I believe one thing, why bother listen to me say that I believe something else entirely? And no education I've ever seen will fix that one.
Ok, so I'm a little confused; are you also Samprimary? What exactly are you arguing here?
And you are mistaken about the effects of education on assumptions. The best college students can in fact learn how to figure out what an opponent is really saying, and argue against it. It's just that modern colleges don't often teach the skill, because they're swamped with gammas and deltas who need to be taught what a female orgasm looks like.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: The best college students can in fact learn how to figure out what an opponent is really saying, and argue against it. It's just that modern colleges don't often teach the skill, because they're swamped with gammas and deltas who need to be taught what a female orgasm looks like.
Again, any evidence for this? At all?
Here's a reason to think you're wrong: the best students are reliably segregated from the worst students by our admissions system, which allows stronger students into better colleges.
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