To be fair child labour laws were put in place to make it possible for children to get an education rather than spending their childhoods working in the factories.
Nonsense. It is politically economically
impossible for laws criminalizing the productive employment of children to have any beneficial effect whatsoever, or even any practical puissance providing that the value of a child's work product is in any way significant.
For subsistance farmers all over the world, the ability of children in the first decade of life to perform agricultural chores provides a value that so commonly exceeds the cost of that child's upkeep that (except in times of profound famine) it has been customary for farmers to actively foster and adopt such children, male
and female. Recall the "orphan trains" of late 19th Century America.
Moreover, a child can be extremely productive as a worker without any real impairment of his/her education. Children employed as actors in the theater, in the film industy, and in television are gainfully engaged in intensively laborious remunerative activities while sustaining no objectively demonstrable adverse consequences with regard to their educations. Horror stories about "child stars" focus on the gaudy exceptions, not the experiences of most youngsters so engaged.
The professional educationalists - particularly those employed in government school systems - have increasingly stressed the value of total immersion in the pedagogical process, and in recent years have demanded that children given into their control live lives utterly committed to didactic instruction of one kind or another. When children are not directly under the command of teachers, they're hammered with homework set to reinforce the ideological conditioning ordained by their captors.
But the experience of child actors offers proof that
very little formal classroom time is really needed to provide youngsters in the first two decades of life with the structured educational experience required to perform intellectually at levels of function equal or superior to those attained by age-peers compelled to suffer through six or eight hours of daily schooling for five days a week, nine months a year.
The truth about child labor in manufacturing is the same as holds for
adult unskilled manual labor in the same venues. Repetitious "donkey work" functions in factories are far more cost-efficiently fulfilled by way of systems engineering solutions, which also have the advantages of quality enhancement and consistency.
One of the truths most inconvenient for the professional educationalists (and the vast pork-barrel machinery of government schooling) is that children and adolescents would almost certainly be better off - not only more content but also better educated - were their school days cut in half, their classroom time confined to the inculcation of those skills which best facilitated the individual's acquisition of such knowledge as he or she would tend to find of greatest utility and enjoyment.
The rest of their time the children can and should put to such purposes as they find most beneficial. In a free society,
ceteris paribus, that would tend to see many of them seeking and engaging in profitable enterprise of one kind or another.
