work ethic does not mean child slave labor, except in Republicanese

He's...not actually joking.

Gingrich: Laws preventing child labor are 'truly stupid'


I know, titles can be misleading sometimes! So let's...

"It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in child laws which are truly stupid," Gingrich said. "Saying to people you shouldn't go to work before you're 14, 16. You're totally poor, you're in a school that's failing with a teacher that's failing."

Gingrich then proposed a system he said would help those students rise from poverty.

"I tried for years to have a very simple model. These schools should get rid of unionized janitors, have one master janitor, pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work; they'd have cash; they'd have pride in the schools. They'd begin the process of rising."

...what, are his servants getting old and he wants to save money and get them trained at school now instead of that uppity math and reading nonsense they've been getting?

The Republican Party, ladies and gentleman. Make the poor kids work to clean up after the rich ones. That'll teach 'em.

[Weird but true; I did work from fourth grade to eleventh grade at my school's lunchroom to pay for my lunch during the school year. It was like, an hour a day and we controlled the schools' ice cream access. Twelfth grade I was abroad, so I couldn't. I'm still grumpy about that.]

Comments

[niqaeli]

Yes, because clearly we invented child labour laws for no reason whatsoever.

So, basically, everyone in the Republican party has drunk of the koolaid finally. Barry Goldwater is fucking weeping in his grave.

[seperis]

I had to read it twice to believe what he was saying. I kept thinking he was going for the idea that all the kids in the school would take turns in doing some school cleaning/etc, which is actually a fantastic idea if it's a requirement for all students and was like, each did an hour a day or so. Not the junior chapter of the Future Undereducated Servant Class of America.

[niqaeli]

Yeah, no, I mean if it were about all the students pitching in to help keep the school clean, that could be a really interesting and good idea (the devil would still be in the details, but the idea itself would be reasonable).

I just, I don't. What.

I will be over in my little corner, seeing if I can invent a time machine so I can go get the Progressives who founded Arizona and have them kick all the modern Republicans asses. I mean, maybe first introduce them to modern social justice and civil rights, but even WITHOUT that, it would possibly still be an improvement and oh my god seriously. I can't even.

[seperis]

So much this.

[ratcreature]

We had such work service for cleaning up the school yard and other common areas in my school, it worked via a roster. Also each class had to keep their own room clean (well not wiping the floor or the windows or such, but keeping it clean from litter and sweeping the worst up with a broom so that the actual cleaners could do their work quickly). The only ones who had to do extra were the smokers, who had to keep the smokers' corner clean with a separate duty roster (no strict anti-smoking laws back then yet and the official smoking age to buy cigarettes was not 18, so students were allowed to smoke in that area once they were old enough). But that wasn't child labor but just "cleaning up after yourself" because students would throw milk cartons and other litter all over the place.

[seperis]

See, I've always liked that idea, especially if the kids were assigned to their own classrooms and their common areas so they'd have to deal with the consequences of shirking a task. Or shared cleaning of the lunchroom/playground/et al. That'd be an hour or so a day.

I'm weirded out by the idea of the poorer kids forced into working instead of studying or, you know, being kids.

[ratcreature]

With my school it didn't even take an hour. Usually with the yard and common areas if it was your turn to keep a section clean it was enough to use the one longer 20 minute recess to do that, and since you only had to once in a while and each area was shared with a couple of other people it really wasn't much work. And sweeping the classroom was done once at the end of the day, so that was a few minutes after school ended that you had to stay longer if it was your turn. So it had no impact on the school schedule at all and very little on the playtime.

[busaikko]

In Japan, students clean the schools daily from... kindergarten on, I think. Kids clean their classrooms (and do windows and floors and take out trash) and there are rotations of students who clean special rooms (like the music rooms and the toilets). Professional cleaners polish the floors a couple times a year, and once a year all parents do a big school cleaning (we can do things like clean the toilet fans and get down dust from high up). At my current school, I'm responsible for two AV rooms, each of which gets a team of six students, three for brooms and dustpan, three for wiping down tables and chairs and erasing any graffiti.

The educational reason for this is, as Mr Gringrich says, to instill a sense of cleanliness, pride, and respect in students... but this only really works *because* a) all students must participate and b) no one gets paid. Saying only a few students should work, and they should be paid low wages for it is ridiculous.

[hazel]

It astonishes me that he doesn't seem to have even thought of the idea that maybe, if schools in poorer areas are systemically "failing" students, schools in poorer areas should be better funded so that they, like, don't do that.

I have been enraged by my recent national elections, but at least there is nobody in the (actually with a chance of being elected) political spectrum here that advocates removing child labour laws to "teach work ethics" or whatever.

[sapote]

Hahaha, oh, Newt, stay classy.

The best part about this is how he's planning to eliminate any publicly-funded well-paying jobs for the field he thinks these eight-year-olds should go into. If we were an economy with a huge manufacturing sector, suggesting that poor students be trained in manual labor would still be icky but would at least make sense. But he's planning to eliminate janitorial jobs! And then train children to be janitors! He's deliberately creating a labor oversupply for a field he's trying to disassemble! IT IS JUST SO GINGRICH.

[lilacsigil]

1. So fix the schools
2. "Rising" to all those other jobs with low pay and no job security and no healthcare?

Yeah, great ideas there.

[out_there]

Yeesh. It's a lousy idea, but I'm a little extra horrified that we recently had a similiar-ish idea from our Liberal (read: approx our equivalent of the republicans -- conservative and more focused to the wealthy, less supportive of welfare for those who are earning under $30k but happy to increase welfare limits so you can still get some kind of government support when your household is earning up to $150k).

"...it's all very well keeping kids at school past Year 10 but they've got to be the right kids being kept at school past Year 10... I'd want to make sure that the right kids are getting the money and that we really were keeping the right kids at school because if you've got the wrong kids at school it can end up like a glorified occupational therapy, basically."

Apparently, an education is only deserved if you're not poor or one of the "wrong" kids. *frowny face*