In an e-brief for the C.D. Howe Institute, Prof. Richards, of Simon Fraser University, describes the high-school diploma as “a low rung on the educational ladder” but still an essential one. The employment rate for young people without diplomas, he says, is 40 per cent; with them, it’s 65 per cent – meaning that dropouts are apt to live difficult lives “with lengthy bouts of unemployment and poverty.”
Prof. Richards says the problem is the destructive legacy bequeathed to children “in groups characterized by poverty and cultural traditions that do not stress formal schooling.” These children exhibit “a worrisome lack of educational achievement compared with the Canadian average.”
Canada’s students performed well, on average, in the most recent OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) report card: placing near the top in reading, math and science scores of 15-year-old students in 60 countries. Canada’s weakest students, though, performed poorly when compared with the weakest students (the lowest quintile) around the world: 28th in reading, 25th in math and 20th in science.
Children who drop out start falling behind by Grade 3, Prof. Richards says, which suggests that pre-kindergarten programs might help – though, he says, they’re probably not helpful to children from “stable, middle-class, two-parent families.” Studies of Quebec’s celebrated $7-a-day daycare program, he says, show the highly subsidized program delivers “little or no cognitive benefits” for most children.
Prof. Richards says other studies show that the segregation of low-performance children in racial or cultural “clusters” is not helpful, either. (Much better, he says, to keep these children exposed “to expectations of academic success.”) Implicitly, in his call for aggressive experimentation, Prof. Richards concludes that no solution has yet been found for children bereft of the tradition of formal schooling, either in Canada or elsewhere.
But perhaps these children shouldn’t be in “school,” as now defined, at all. Perhaps “school” makes things worse. Around the world, on average, 20 per cent of children drop out. For a significant number of kids, “school” just doesn’t work.
What’s the alternative? As John Wesley, the 18th-century founder of Methodism, argued, it’s real work. As an aggressive experiment, why not try child labour? Although now corrupted by iconic images of adolescent Victorian chimney sweeps and wrenching pictures of young Third World sweatshop labourers, child labour has an honourable history that extends back to the apprenticeships of the Middle Ages. In more recent history, think young farmhands, vocational schools and co-op programs in colleges and universities. All inspire a culture of learning.
Teachers still honour the concept of child labour: homework. And “child workers” sounds quite different from “child labourers.” But we’re not talking of returning children to Dickens’s “dark satanic mills.” We’re talking different ways of learning. One of the most persuasive advocates of child labour is German sociologist Manfred Liebel. In his 2004 book A Will of Their Own: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Working Children, he argues that educators should put children to work. “Take the hazard out of the work, not the child.” With years of study behind him, he celebrates children as “young adults” with a capacity – indeed, a compulsion – to work.
Prof. Liebel says formal schooling robs some children of pride and self-respect – by causing them to fail. He says, further, that some children prefer real work and, given half a chance, will voluntarily choose it over classroom work. He’s almost certainly right. It’s not more playtime that “dropout children” need. It’s honest-to-God work time.
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