Polytropy

Give childhood back to children.

via Give childhood back to children.

I created this article by pressing a button beneath the friend’s article that is linked to above. That article links in turn to an article by Peter Gray in The Independent with the headline “Give childhood back to children: if we want our offspring to have happy, productive and moral lives, we must allow more time for play, not less”. Gray writes,

I’m lucky. I grew up in the United States in the 1950s, at the tail end of what the historian Howard Chudacoff refers to as the “golden age” of children’s free play. The need for child labour had declined greatly, decades earlier, and adults had not yet begun to take away the freedom that children had gained.

I don’t think Gray quite says this, but it seems to me that making young people study in school for the sake of their future remunerative employment is just another form of child labor, even if it is supposed to be for their own good. As angry children are supposedly wont to say, they didn’t ask to be born in the first place.