Children Of Our Times (And Places)

The lead story on last night's Newsnight, taking up something like a third of the entire programme, was about the cotton industry in Uzbekistan. The stuff on how poorly the farmers are paid, and on the general poverty there, was good. But we were expected to be utterly outraged that the schools were shut "for two and a half months of the year" (imagine!), so that the children could bring in the harvest. This is exactly the reason for our own schools' long summer holidays.

The schools existed. We were actually shown them. It was just that they were closed during the harvest season, just like ours, for all that we have since the (extremely industrialised) late nineteenth century tried to tell ourselves, for no apparent reason, that that season is in fact in October.

For most of our history, it has been normal for children to work. In most of the world, it still is. If our fabulously rich society believes (as it might) that this gets in the way of education, then it should make schools open longer, it should drastically reduce school holidays, and it should find some way in which all of those children's families could share in the general prosperity, thereby removing the need for their offspring to work.