Re: Equal opportunity (was Re: Will the free market solve everything?)

Mark Grant (mark@unicorn.com)
Sun, 2 Mar 1997 10:54:39 +0000


On Tue, 25 Feb 1997, J. de Lyser wrote:

> Problem is how to finance such an educational system without falling back
> on state-like practices. Ideas anyone ? Auto-financing schools involving
> child labor seems more than a little unethical ?

I still don't understand this thing about 'child labor'. Sure, I don't
really want to see eight-year-old kids working in factories or mines, but
when I was fourteen I spent a lot of my free time writing software. Why
should I have to do it for free when I could have been earning money at
it and gaining some useful resume points?

Incidentally, I saw an interesting TV show a couple of months ago which
was looking at the first anti-child-labor laws in the UK. They made a
reasonable case that much of the evidence given to the government was
staged, and that the kids much preferred working in factories to working
on farms.

Mark

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