Jeff Tucker sobre os benifícios do trabalho infantil

Put Those Kids To Work!

Jeffrey Tucker·March 5, 2012

I was reading a wonderful set of small biographies of Gilded Age entrepreneurs and took note of something we all know once we think about it. These men and women worked in productive labor from an early age.
They universally credit these early work experiments for instilling an ethic to stick to the job, be alert to opportunities and feel that sense of accomplishment that comes from the exercise of stamina. They don’t typically talk about school. They talk about the barges they steered, the rocks they hauled, the mines they dug, the rivers they navigated. Their work was their main teacher.
This was hardly unusual. All through the 18th and 19th centuries, all kids worked. This was not at the expense of academics. Kids still learned to read, write and do math. Work was something that they did in addition to schooling and was part of schooling. So it has been through all of human history. The idea that a healthy kid of 14 years old would do nothing but sit in a desk for seven hours every day and then play video games and chat on Facebook the rest of the time would be unthinkable.
In the developing world, matters are different. Everyone works. Stealth of Nations, a new and mind-blowing book by Robert Neuwirth, shows that in the fastest-growing economies in the world, kids are working from the age of 10. This is not exploitation — quite the opposite. It means that the kids are getting a great education in the real world of commerce. This gives them a leg up in life, and a firmer hold on the future than America’s young people have....
If you have kids, nothing is more important for their future. You can spend $150,000 or more on their college education. You can pay for expensive tutors to get them through their standardized tests. You can buy them the most-expensive computers and tools to become smart. But if they do not understand the meaning of work from experience, they will not be prepared for a creative and prosperous life.
One way or another, put those kids to work!
Mais