Boy Labour and Apprenticeship

by Reginald A. Bray

The proposals for raising the school age and for prohibiting child labour during that period will do much to strengthen the system of supervision. Another year of school discipline; another year of medical inspection and medical treatment; protection during another year from the evil effects of overwork and from the demoralization due to “blind-alley” occupations and premature earning—these reforms will bring us some way on our journey towards the new apprenticeship, but they will not bring us the whole way. There remain the three years which lie between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, and include the greater part of the period of adolescence—in some respects the most important period in the development of a human being. It is during these years that character begins to take its permanent set; it is during these years that, with the coming of puberty, there is most risk of ugly and dangerous outbreaks; it is during these years that physical health demands the most careful attention; and it is during these years that, with the exception of the failures of civilization—the physically, the mentally, and the morally defective—there is no real supervision or, under existing conditions, any hope of securing it.

To allow irresponsible freedom during these years is to court disaster; to give it suddenly and in an unqualified degree, as it is given now when the school career is brought to an abrupt end, is to follow a course condemned by all educationalists. No parent, even the most thoughtless, among the well-to-do classes would think of treating his son in this fashion. His whole scheme of education is founded on the principle of a slow and gradual loosening of the bonds of discipline. The close supervision of the private school is replaced by the larger liberty of the public school, which in turn opens into the greater but still restricted freedom of the University.

Freedom must come slowly. We want a bridge between the elementary school of the boy and the full-time workshop of the man. Such a bridge would be created by the establishment of the proposed half-time system. For half the day—or at any rate, for half his time—the lad between the ages of fifteen and eighteen would be compelled to attend a place of education, and only during the remaining half be permitted to undertake employment for wages. The advantages of this proposal are many. First, the influence of the school would be retained for an additional three years, and under the half-time system the freedom of the youthful wage-earner would find a suitable limitation in the half-time control of the school. Secondly, we should have the opportunity of another three years’ medical inspection and medical treatment. With supervision over the health of the community continued until the age of eighteen we might fairly anticipate a rapid improvement in the physical efficiency of the worker. In particular, we should be able to detect, in a way now impossible, the effects of various forms of employment on those engaged in them. Inspection under the provisions of the Factory and Workshops Act, as has been shown, is too limited in character to do more than pick out a few young persons obviously unfit for the occupation they have selected; but, with the education authority responsible for the health of juveniles, and using to the full extent its powers to provide preventive measures or to veto in the case of certain individuals certain forms of work, we should have gone far to secure that no one should enter on or remain in a trade for which he was physically unfit. Thirdly, as already shown, a half-time system is the only really effective way of limiting the hours of juvenile employment. If the lad is compelled to be elsewhere than in the workshop for half his time, we have an automatic check on excessive work. Other advantages of this system will appear when we come to deal with questions of training and the provision of an opening.

The half-time system should be made compulsory throughout the country; it ought not to be left to local option to decide. The local rating authority naturally wishes to encourage the establishment of workshops and factories within its area, and would be unwilling to adopt Acts which might prove a deterrent. It would be a most unsatisfactory state of affairs for employers to evade the spirit of the law by moving into districts where the law was not enforced. It is a little unfortunate that the Education (Scotland) Act, 1908, which allows a limited amount of compulsion in connection with continuation schools, is founded on the principle of local option. The recommendations of the Consultative Committee of the Board of Education are vitiated in a similar way. Local option can never be really successful. It will elect to act only where there is least opposition from employers—in other words, where action is least necessary; and it will do nothing where boy labour is most exploited and regulation most urgently required. In one direction alone can local option be allowed with advantage. It may be permitted to decide on the precise kind or kinds of half-time to be enforced within their area. Boys might attend school on the half-day system or on the alternate day system. Or, again, they might spend three days in the workshop and three days in the school, or under certain circumstances devote six months of the year to the workshop and the remaining six months to the school. It would be desirable to allow the local authority considerable liberty in their methods of adapting the half-time system to the special needs of the trades of the district, provided always that a true half-time system was established.

There is no serious difficulty in the way of compelling attendance at the half-time school. It would be enforced just as attendance at the elementary school is enforced, and by the same officers. Further, no employer would be permitted to employ a boy between the ages of fifteen and eighteen who could not show satisfactory evidence of attendance at school. Or if, as may be the case, it is found desirable to permit boys to be engaged only by means of the Labour Exchange, the Labour Exchange itself would prove a most effective way of enforcing attendance.

There is nothing new or impracticable in the principle of the proposal. Compulsory attendance at continuation schools can be required in Scotland. Such attendance is compulsory in parts of Germany and Switzerland.[178] It is exacted by certain employers in this country from their apprentices. Further, the fact that for many years the half-time system has been in use in the case of many important industries, and tens of thousands of children so employed, demonstrates clearly enough that there is nothing impossible in the application of a half-time system to juveniles. It would, no doubt, cause some inconvenience, and some employers might dispense with the services of juveniles; but no more difficulty would arise than has arisen when any fresh regulations have been imposed; and we should see, as we have always done in the past, the employers who predicted inevitable ruin before the event, as soon as the proposal became law adapt themselves, with that placid content and admirable success which they have always displayed after the event, to the new condition of affairs.

(d) The Parents’ Point of View.

The three proposals just made have one characteristic in common-they all directly set a limit to the employment of children and young persons. It is possible that some readers may regard them from another point of view, and say that in limiting employment they seriously diminish the income of the family. Will the poor parent, whose lot is pitiable enough as things are, be able to stand the loss?

In considering this, the parents’ point of view, we must guard against being caught in the noose of a vicious circle. We must not perpetuate an evil in order to mitigate its present effects. Many, probably most, of those parents whose income hovers about the margin of possible existence are in this pitiful position because their own childhood has been neglected. As children, they have been overworked, and they are now physically unfit for regular employment; as children, they have been allowed to go uncontrolled and untrained, and now, as men, they are paying a heavy tax for the earnings of their boyhood. They receive little because they are worth little; their work is precarious because the sphere of their usefulness is small. We must not allow their children to live as they lived when children, and so pass on to the next generation the taint of inefficiency and its consequent wages of starvation merely because to-day wages of starvation need to be supplemented. We can never hope to overtake and pass an evil if we always cast it in front of us. The one clear message to the reformer of to-day is that he should look to prevention, and not merely to cure; and the one clear hope of a nation’s future lies in insuring to every youth, as he crosses the threshold of manhood, the fullest realization of that development whose promise was his at birth. It might be well worth while for a country lavishly to endow poverty for a generation in order to free itself once for all from its fatal infection. But there is no reason to believe that we must resort to this drastic measure because there is no reason to believe that the proposed restrictions of child labour will in any way injure the parents.

Take first the earnings of school-children. There is very little reason to believe that they often make any effective contribution to the income of the home. They are irregular, they are small, and very frequently the boys retain them as pocket-money. Where they are large, as in the case of children employed during the pantomime season, they often form a convenient excuse for the parent to go idle for a time. The only large exception to this rule is the case of the widow. Here, indeed, the earnings do usually find their way home, materially increase the miserable pittance allowed by the guardians, and must be regarded as a tax levied on children in aid of the ratepayer. Humanity and a reformed Poor Law may be trusted to remove the tax.