child labour can be a positive thing. sometimes.

[cylon]

i have recently been reading a lot about the apalling living and working conditions of the people making a lot of clothes sold in uk high streets.
there was arather nasty article by someone in the times on sunday about how he thought they were only worth 40P an hour and we shouldnt be bothered. i thought he was speaking out of his backside personally.
however i just want to say that kids working and earning a wage is NOT always a bad thing.
in many parts of the world, it is the only alternative to starvation. well meaning organisations that then close down the only avenues of earning for these families condemn them
someone who is earning a wage, is providing for his her family. the are not involved in crimes. they are not involved in armies, (child soldiers) they are not involved in prostitution. the job can be a training or an apprenticeship. it usually, but not always i admit, is a method of improving there quality of life.
the problem is the people who take advantage of child workers. and the governments societis that allow situations to exist where children need to work.
i hope i have made some sense here.

qoq, they need to learn BOTH skills.
school alone doesnt do that. i think that is one of the things that the second link was saying.

many many years ago i overheard adults having a conversation. i think i may well have initiated the conversation earlier in the day by my strongly independent feminist and complelty ignorant 13 year old ideas.
in certain parts of tribal controlled pakistan, they had been campainging to lower the age of marriage from 18, to i dont know, maybe 16 or 14. i thought it abominable that they wanted to marry off the girls without letting them enjoy life. apparently the reasoning was that the parents couldnt protect them from the local mafia type people carting the girls off and raping them. if the girls were married, then the local thugs werent interested in the girls as they werent virgins any more. the adults knew there was nothing they could do to get rid of the thugs, others would just replace them. they were trying to protect there children from violent attack. something i understand now,but didnt then. ( i must have said something rather simplisitic like' well why dont they call the police?')

cylon - my DH was educated in a 3rd world country (at a state school) they taught woodwork and metalwork (amongst other 'practical' subjects) as did the majority of other schools - even in the more rural areas. Plus children often learned their parents "skills" at home/the weekends.

If you have a basic education - the opportunity will usually be there to go and learn "skills" that could provide employment - if you've only learned the skills but lack the basic educatioin you've little chance of succeeding - adult education programmes are few and far between (unlike here in the UK).

And my dh is from Kenya, where there was no free education beyond a basic level. (there is now) people struggled to educate their children because they recognised that it mattered so much. Of course, many people could not pay. My dh was lucky. Talk to him about what matters more and how things should work.

oo MTP - I didn't know that!

Didn't know what, that he's Kenyan or that he had a secondary education.

both