Solution of the Child Labor Problem/Chapter 2
"Oh, he's well grown, the work won't hurt him any," is an attitude very commonly taken by people who are interested in the continuance of the child labor system. But what does "well grown" mean? If it means "partly grown," the statement is correct. Children of fourteen are rapidly changing in body and mind. What shall be their environment and inspiration during this expanding period? enthusiasm, play, and life, or grind, monotony, and degeneration.
The bodies of children who go to work between the ages of fourteen and sixteen are still growing. Some measurements recently made of a number of Chicago children who applied for work certificates show that "The boys of fifteen years receiving permission to work averaged nearly a foot taller, and about four pounds heavier than the boys of fourteen; and the girls of fifteen years averaged nearly one-half foot taller, and about fifteen pounds heavier than the girls whose ages averaged fourteen years."[2]
The statement that children develop physically between their thirteenth and their fifteenth birthdays seems almost obvious, and the figures are cited only to prove beyond cavil the existence of the development and to show its extent. It might be well to consider carefully, when a boy is sent into the factory, whether the wheels of progress will shape his growing body into a man or a machine. If the body develops in response to the factory environment it will be a machine. In animals, we respect this period of growth. What farmer is there who would hitch a colt to the plow and compel it to work ten hours a day? "Assuredly not," you exclaim, "that would be such folly." And why? Simply because the body of the colt is still plastic and unformed; as yet it is not prepared to meet the physical strain involved in plowing. The farmer has learned this fact traditionally and perhaps by experience; but he has learned it, and he respects the period of growth because lack of respect for it will almost inevitably mean money loss.
Why is this discrimination made in favor of the colt?
The child of fourteen years is still developing, with a body plastic and unformed, like that of the colt. Yet such children are expected, as indicated by the laws of nine-tenths of the states, to work ten, eleven, and in some extreme cases, twelve hours a day in a factory, at tasks which prove as burdensome as is the galling plow collar to the colt.
Why such a contrast? Why such a sharp distinction between the treatment of a growing colt and of a growing child? Is the child better prepared to do the work? The figures just cited show that the body of the child of fourteen, like the body of the colt, is developing and rounding out, and that it is, therefore, as readily ruined in one case as in another. Why the contrast? It would seem that the money element is the chief consideration. In one respect the colt differs from the child,—it possesses cash value. It requires an outlay of money to replace a colt; a "wanted" sign will replace the child.
It is interesting to note that one never speaks of a "colt's work" as contrasted with a "horse's work," because the colt is not called upon to work at all. Its period of youth is left free for play and invigorating, out-door exercise. It has remained for human beings to divide up the work of the world among themselves,—to call a part of it "child's work," a part of it "woman's work," and a part of it "man's work."
II. Play
The growing child is not prepared to go into modern, subdivided industry and take up a task that involves a monotonous daily grind, for he is physically and mentally incapable of withstanding the pressure of such labor. His natural instinct leads toward play, and if he is prohibited from playing, he has lost a part of his life which he can never replace.
During early youth, when the body is developing and plastic, there are two forces constantly at work, the one calling the child to higher ideals of life and growth, and the other tending to brutalize him for the sake of the few dollars which his unformed hands will earn. All of the future is conditioned on that struggle; if the forces of the ideal conquer, the child will develop through normal channels into a fully rounded man; if the forces of the dollar win, the child life is set and hardened into a money-making machine, grinding for a space and then giving place to another machine which has not yet been subject to the wear and tear of the life struggle.
Long youth means long life.
Slowly this truth is penetrating the public mind. After years of experiment and hesitating speculation, the nation is realizing that the child who goes into life without having learned to play, has taken the shortest road to the almshouse or the penitentiary; if he does not reach his destination, society is not responsible, for it presented him with a first-class passage to one of these institutions when it robbed him of his childhood.
Mr. Nibecker, Superintendent of the Glen Mills (Pa.) House of Refuge, was asked, "What proportion of your boys were school boys, and what proportion were working boys at the time of their arrest?" His answer was, "I can give no proportion for the reason that the school boy is such a rare exception with us. I can say out of our experience here that the lines of commitment and lack of schooling run parallel. We have very few, if any, boys who were not working boys at the time of their arrest or just previous to their arrest."[3]
"Lines of commitment and lack of schooling run parallel." This "lack of schooling" means lack of the chance to be young. Truly, placing an undeveloped child at work in the world of modern industry, is fraught with grave consequences. With these boys in the House of Refuge a shortening of the period of youth meant a shortening of the work period:—child workers turn easily into child criminals.
"Civilization is the result of man's having been young; play has laid the foundation of culture by organizing his instincts and busying them in ways that tell for the future of the man. Play extends its influences over everything in childhood, and for the child everything can be made the subject of play."
If it be true that long youth means a high development, and that any shortening in youth means a proportionally shortened period of usefulness of the individual, it might be worth while to cast about for some means to preserve that youth to the necessary extent. Such a means can be found in play;—the chief guardian of youth. "The animal or child does not play because he is young, but has a period of youth because he must play … the very existence of youth is due to the necessity for play."[4]
Through expression, the body of the growing child is developed most surely and most completely. The originalities of a child "arise through his action, struggle, trial of things for himself, and in an imitative way."[5]
The child of twelve or fourteen who stands at a machine, tying threads for eleven hours a day, is not growing through expression, but is being narrowed by an unvarying, monotonous impression. Slowly but surely he takes the shape into which this impression is forcing him, until he has become "A spinner at $6 a week." As the machine before him is a machine at $500, so he is a "mill-hand at $6." If the expert workman is to have a quick eye, a firm step, and a steady hand to do the work of the world, he must play in youth.
"As play is the most expressive form of action, so it gives a growth, both in power to do and power to appreciate, that does not come in equal measure from work."[6] An efficient, strong, noble citizenship can be developed only by building upon childhood. Play is a part of childhood, and only upon a foundation of play and childhood can such a superstructure be erected.
To grow in mind, the child must play. He must construct and evolve; at first houses of blocks; then whistles; then games; then school problems; and finally engines, and books, and theories, and truths. The child who sits for eleven hours a day and guides a piece of cloth as it rushes past him on the machine, neither constructs nor evolves; his mind sleeps—and too often it is the sleep of intellectual death.
Play is the first step in the constructive work of a man's life. "Education, perhaps, should really begin with directing childish sports aright. Fröbel thought it the purest and most spiritual activity of childhood, the germinal leaves of all later life. Schooling that lacks recreation favors dullness, for play makes the mind alert and its joy helps all anabolic activities.… Johnson adds that it is doubtful if a great man ever accomplished his life work without having reached a play interest in it."[7]
At an early period in life the child is not prepared to take a place in the great work of affairs and when called upon to do so, it is overwhelmed just as a day laborer would be if called upon to take charge of the New York Central Railroad. The task would be one outside of the scope of his development. So to the child, thrust out early into the rush and clamor of the market-place, the task is overwhelming. The child in monotonous, subdivided industry is out of its natural environment, and it gasps for its native air of play as a fish on the sand gasps for water.
III. The Intellect and Work
"A strong mind in a strong body" goes the old saying. How detrimental to the development of a strong body child labor may be, has already been indicated. That child labor may stunt physical development cannot be questioned,—having wrought havoc in the body, how easy it is to wreck the mind! "The greatest evil of child labor outside of the physical effects, is the mental and moral loss suffered in the deprivation of an education and the substitution of a daily round of monotonous labor, which is mere profitless drudgery so far as preparation for adult life is concerned, and is calculated to blunt the undeveloped faculties of the child."[8]
Play means growth for the body and development for the mind. The children who play, grow, and grow because they play. There is no sadder experience in the whole range of human life than to see a bright, intelligent, wholesome child leave school and start work in a factory. Gradually the flame of enthusiasm grows less bright, then it flickers hopelessly, and finally it goes out. The tale is told in the lack-luster eye, the harsh, indifferent voice, the languishing gait. The working child at first has no time for play; then he forgets to play, and finally he has no desire to play. The factory has done its work,—the child's mind has changed from an impressionable, plastic mass, to a set, changeless thing for which education is no longer probable or even possible. The universal testimony of those who teach in night school is that children who perform monotonous labor for ten hours each day are not capable of learning when night comes. The nervous strain and the reaction from it are too great. The child under sixteen can seldom be counted upon to do intellectual work after a ten-hour day of factory monotony.
Said a boy of twenty-one who had worked for two years in a woolen mill, starting when he was thirteen: "If I had stayed in that mill, I should be dead now, or, at any rate, dead to the world. We had a good boss, but the work was awful,—not hard, but so unvarying, day after day, that it ground out your soul."
This is generally true of child labor, but all child labor is not drudgery, particularly in the small establishments where the owner can and does take a personal interest in his employees. The great evil comes with the growth of the large factories in which the child forms but one of the cogs in the machinery, where the very essence of the work is monotony. As industries are standardized, there are more and more places created where a machine, guided by a child, or an unskilled adult, does the work formerly performed by skilled men. If the child were learning to manufacture paper boxes, that would be, in itself, an education; but the child who spends its days turning in the edges of box covers, neither learns nor grows. The task is standardized and, from its very nature, hopelessly monotonous and deadening.
Child labor is a process of mind stunting. First the child is removed from the possibility of an education, taken from the school and placed in the factory where he no longer has an opportunity to learn; and then he is subjected to monotonous toil, for long hours, often all night, in unwholesome places, until his body and mind harden into the familiar form of the unskilled workman.
When the child drops from the ideal of play and joy to the misery of work and pain, he exchanges a mental life for a physical one. Henceforth he lives for the body,—neither knowing nor caring for those necessary higher things.
IV. Morality and Play
Play has a moral code of its own. Not only does the hard player make the hard worker, but he makes the good citizen as well. Boys seldom cheat once at marbles; never twice. Ostracism from the group is the penalty, one which the average boy dare not incur. The rules of top spinning are inviolable. It is decided for all time who shall "show the first shake" and who shall have the first shot. No one cares to take a shot out of turn. Thus in their play each group of boys forms its social organization, and formulates the rules by which it is to be governed.
The child who grows up as an a "only child" among older people lacks the development that comes from this group action and group morality of child plays. He is "different" from the other children, and when he goes to school for the first time he is in a new world, which is wholly apart from his former experience. Such a child has no conception of the group morality which comes from the games of other children, and in consequence of this he often experiences difficulties in getting into the spirit of the others.
So, too, with the working child who has, from his earliest years, engaged in labor which meant nothing to him,—he lacks the group instinct. He does not know how to play with the others. It is obvious that in his work he is wholly deficient in any desire to co-operate in the common labor of his group. If co-operation is desirable and group action advantageous, what utter folly it is to foster a system like child labor, which deadens the very instincts that lead to effective group action.
"Playing fair" means much to the child and to the community. It is the element that makes the desirable citizen and the desirable associate. The child who learns to play fair will, nine times in ten, work fair, in the world of business. "Play at its best is only a school of ethics."[9] That is why, unlike gymnastics, play has as much soul as body. "When a little girl plays 'dolls' or 'keeping house,' she is living herself into the deepest springs of human life."[10] The child who plays has the greatest opportunity for that soul growth for which there is always a demand far above the supply. Among the army of working children, there is more of cigarette smoking, loud talk, and bad talk than there is of play.
Play is to the child what poetry is to the man. Deprive either of this essential element, and from the misdirected sowing is reaped a harvest of misdirected lives. Instill into a boy's mind learning which he sees and feels not to have the highest worth, and which cannot become a part of his active life and increase it, and his freshness, spontaneity, and the fountains of his play slowly run dry. Such is the fate of the average child who spends his play time feeding with hand and body the modern industrial mill. Premature work and premature decay of moral fiber are kindred forces running hand in hand toward the almshouse.
V. Morality and Work
The child who gets no chance to play loses the opportunity for moral development which play affords; the child who goes to work almost inevitably gains a positive code of immorality which could not be duplicated elsewhere.
Entering the workroom with adults, young and old, people of all types of morality and immorality, the child ceases to be a child in knowledge while he is still a child in ideas. There is no home influence or school influence to ward off the dangers, no mother or teacher to point out the hidden rocks. The child is pilot and captain, but how easily influenced and misguided!
In a great many cases, the nervous strain of the workroom is very great. The children are "speeded up" with the adults. When an outside opportunity offers any change, any counter-excitement, it is seized eagerly, no matter what its character may be, for the sake of the change. Very, very often it is of the wrong character. "Child labor is generally acknowledged to be an irreparable injury to the children and to society at large. Bodies and minds are stunted and deformed; crime, violence, and all of the social evils which spring from a brutalized population are fostered."[11]
To be making a living, associated with all classes of people at an early and immature age, to be contributing to the family fund, and hence to be more or less independent,—what unwholesome things for the average child! Independence, before the proper age of independence, often means ruin.
Those who do not believe that factory children are knowing far beyond their years, should spend a noon hour with a group of factory boys, fourteen or fifteen years of age, and listen to their conversation. It is usually a thousand times more foul than that heard around the average saloon. One immoral person in a factory will easily contaminate the whole. Immorality is an infection which spreads quickly in a crowded workroom.
If the factory life is detrimental to the morals of the average boy, it is far more so to the average girl. One who believes otherwise should read "The Long Day," a story of a New York working-girl as told by herself.
One of the phases of the problem is aptly described by Juliet Wilbor Tomkins. "I know a ramshackle old building in New York in which the top floor is used by a manufacturer of electrical goods. On the floor beneath is a laundry, separated from the street by three long flights of stairs, which are utterly dark except for the gas jets insisted on by the authorities. At half-past five, every afternoon, the men come trooping down just as the laundry girls are let out, tired with the hardest kind of work, and flushed and warm with the long day in a steaming, enervating atmosphere. And night after night the gas jets are mysteriously put out, so that all flock down together in pitch blackness. When you are tempted to believe that the evils of child labor are exaggerated, think what they mean to a girl when she is too young to protect or even to understand herself. Terrible things have been begun on those stairs, yes, and happened there; and they are not the only dark flights of stairs in the New York factories."[12]
After a thorough study of conditions in Pennsylvania, Mr. Peter Roberts writes:—"In interviews with physicians, each of them dwelt upon the moral and social evil of the factory life. Dr. Gerhardt of Allentown said that no vice was unknown to many girls of fifteen years, working in the factories of Allentown.…" Dr. Davis of Lancaster said:—"The result of it all is that these girls fade at an early age, and then they cannot discharge the functions of mothers and wives as they should."[13]
All factory life is not immoral, and immorality is not an essential element in factory life, but under present conditions, factory life and immorality too often go hand in hand, and it behooves society to look carefully to these things and see that they be reduced to the veriest minimum.
Play is the accompaniment of youth. Man has his play time: it is childhood. Man has his work time: it is adult life. The child cannot hope to escape all work, but the greater part of its life must be devoted to play if the functions of the adult life of work are to be well fulfilled. The child who works loses the opportunity for the spontaneous expression of the new life that can come only through play. The child's body is forming at fourteen, and its growth should not be hampered or marred by imposing upon it the restrictions that come with factory life.
As the body of the developing child is denied its complete development by work, so its mental development is curtailed and its moral sensibilities are often stunted by work. Child labor does not necessarily mean stunting and degradation, but the probabilities are that child labor will mean child deterioration.
- ↑ Republished by permission of Education.
- ↑ "From School to Work in Chicago." By Anna E. Nichols. Charities, vol. xvi, p. 235.
- ↑ The Cost of Child Labor: a pamphlet issued by the Pennsylvania Child Labor Committee. P. 22.
- ↑ The Child. By A. F. Chamberlain, London: Scott, 1901. P. 443.
- ↑ Social and Ethical Interpretations. By J. M. Baldwin. New York: Macmillan Co., 1897. P. 99.
- ↑ Moral Education. By E. H. Griggs. New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1904. P. 76.
- ↑ Adolescence. By G. Stanley Hall. New York: Appleton, 1904. Vol. i, pp. 231-232.
- ↑ Labor Problems. By Adams and Sumner. New York: Macmillan Co., 1905. Pp. 64-65.
- ↑ Adolescence. By G. S. Hall. New York: Appleton, 1904. Vol. i, pp. 283-284.
- ↑ Moral Education. By E. H. Griggs. New York; B. W, Huebsch, 1904. P. 77.
- ↑ Labor Problems. By Adams and Sumner. New York: Macmillan Co., 1905. P. 20.
- ↑ "Turning Children Into Dollars." By Juliet Wilbor Tompkins. Success Magazine, January, 1905.
- ↑ From an unpublished Report by Peter Roberts to the Pennsylvania Child Labor Committee.