...and I realized it makes a mockery of child labour laws.
"Tonight, your homework is to vacuum your house." Awesome, no? And since the teachers already know how long it's going to take, either 'only a few minutes' or 'only a few hours' depending on the grade, they can even pay in advance! "You are also assigned to be paid $50." Who could argue with that?
I mean, sure, it's not gonna be as useless, degrading, or painful as 'real' homework, but it should be bad enough!
Can you think of other jobs to assign as homework? Do share.
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2 comments:
I dont get it. Although I would love to see your thesis of mockery to be true. How are you comparing school homework with home chores? Is it because the school grade is seems as a substitute for wage?
I'm actually against the whole child labor prohibition. It is actually degenerating child rearing in western world because it devalues that some work is actually very beneficial, even essencial to the child's development. But with child labor laws, the school system feels motivated to absorb the child's whole time. It turns them into disgruntled humiliated unsatisfied and unappreciated little soviet academicians.
I want to start by saying this post is not entirely in seriousness, which you can check by comparing the main post's length to this comment's.
"It is actually degenerating child rearing in western world because it devalues that some work is actually very beneficial, even essential to the child's development."
I have an article I hope I'll finish at some point here that has this in it:
"The owner's teenage son, David, worked at the shop. Like a lot of Amish who work alongside their parents from an early age, he was incredibly poised and mature.
[...]
"David then admitted, "When I was deciding whether to join the church or not, I thought of my future children and whether they would be brought up without restrictions. I could not imagine it."
"But with child labor laws, the school system feels motivated to absorb the child's whole time."
I see two purposes to child labour laws; to prevent injury to children, and to free them to have a childhood.
The first is not expecting children to work as strenuously as a grown man. The second is to distinguish the law from one that should, logically, also cover adults.
The first is just enshrining common sense into law. The second is what brings it into conflict with schools.
Lacking even the most basic good-faith efforts to check that homework is useful, I must conclude that schools do not care if homework is useful.
Quite apart from whether they should have such civil positive rights, quite apart from the time spent essentially incarcerated each day, there are two fatal problems with homework.
The first is that it frivolously wastes the student's time. The second is that, as I tried to suggest above, the only barrier between normal homework and actual child labour is perception and custom. Which is to say no formal distinction at all.
The latter means there's no logical distinction. The former means it's only due to subjective illusion that this isn't glaringly obvious.
The benefits to the stronger party of turning a blind eye are clear. The benefits to the weaker party, if any, are pretty much cancelled out by the drawbacks. The origin of the illusion is not difficult to trace.
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