"Teenage parasites?" Now who's seeing the world in black-and-white?
>Child work does not have to equal sweatshops (adults work in
>sweatshops as well) or burger flipping - it can be a valuable
experience in
>self-determination, contributing to the community, learning work
>skills, structuring one's life, and appreciating the value of work.
When it comes to teaching "self-determination," my response is similar to that of Jonathan Kozol's. I'm for such practices, but I have yet to meet anybody who is against it. Furthermore, I would like to suggest that a country which actually sends teens to the gas chamber doesn't need to push child discipline any further.
A young person can learn valuable things from a job. Unfortunately, the most common thing he tends to learn is that his individual contributions do little more than hold down costs for his company. To reduce that to a specific morality play of transformation from "bad kid" to "good kid" is to ignore the larger picture.
There is a somewhat wrongful tendency to believe that the discipline of a job and the playtime of consumerism are in conflict. The latter depends on the former. Teens (and workers in general) find justification in their consumerism through their work. They consider it their due for the time lost at a job.
To sum up, shovelling shit does not automatically create "character." It might only teach the worker about his subservient place in society. (Establishing lines of authority is the real concern of your average fundamentalist, by the way.)
>I bet that the teenage brats who today roam the mall wasteland are
>future managers who disparage workers and do not think twice about
taking
>advantage of sweatshop labor overseas - after all they learned to
benefit
>from it at Nike or Gap.
How do you know the brats are shopping at the Gap? I hated to shop for clothes when I was a teen. The brats could be hunting for Chomsky at the bookstore.
This is an easy contempt to express. Who doesn't want a dime for every newspaper column decrying the sloth and political blindness of today's youth? Of course, I wonder if we will see a reverse-trend. (See my previous comments on The 700 Club.)
-- David