Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Sources: Physical abuse and Sexual abuse (mainly by caregivers): National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System, http://www.ndacan.cornell.edu/, analyzed by Finkelhor 2014; Finkelhor et al. 2014. Violent victimization at school: US Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Crime Victimization Survey, Victimization Analysis Tool, http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=nvat. Rates for physical and sexual abuse are per 100,000 children younger than 18. Rates for violent victimization at school are per 10,000 children aged 12–17. The arrows point to 2003 and 2007, the last years plotted in fig. 7–22 and fig. 7–20 in Pinker 2011, respectively.

Another declining form of violence against children is corporal punishment—the spanking, smacking, paddling, birching, tanning, hiding, thrashing, and other crude methods of behavior modification that parents and teachers have inflicted on helpless children at least since the 7th-century-BCE advisory “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” Corporal punishment has been condemned in several United Nations resolutions and has been outlawed in more than half the world’s countries. The United States, once again, is an outlier among advanced democracies in allowing children to be paddled in schools, but even here, approval of all forms of corporal punishment is in slow but steady decline.⁴⁷

Nine-year-old Oliver Twist’s stint at picking oakum out of tarry ropes in an English workhouse is a fictional glimpse at one of the most widespread abuses of children, child labor. Together with Dickens’s novel, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1843 poem “The Cry of the Children” and many journalistic exposés awakened 19th-century readers to the horrific conditions under which children were forced to work in that era. Small children stood on boxes to tend dangerous machinery in mills, mines, and canneries, breathing air thick with cotton or coal dust, kept awake by splashes of cold water in their faces, collapsing into sleep after exhausting shifts with food still in their mouths.

But the cruelties of child labor did not begin in Victorian factories.⁴⁸ Children have always been set to work as farmhands and domestics, and they were commonly hired out as servants to other people or as laborers in cottage industries, often from the age when they could walk. In the 17th century, for example, children put to work in a kitchen would crank a spit with a slab of meat for hours, protected from the fire only by a bale of wet hay.⁴⁹ No one thought of child labor as exploitation; it was a form of moral education, protecting children from idleness and sloth.

Starting with influential treatises by John Locke in 1693 and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1762, childhood was reconceptualized.⁵⁰ A carefree youth was now considered a human birthright. Play was an essential form of learning, and the early years of life shaped the adult and determined the future of society. In the decades around the turn of the 20th century, childhood was “sacralized,” as the economist Viviana Zelizer has put it, and children achieved their current status as “economically worthless, emotionally priceless.”⁵¹ Under pressure from children’s advocates, and helped along by affluence, smaller families, an expanding circle of sympathy, and an increasing premium on education, Western societies gradually did away with child labor. A snapshot of these forces pushing in the same direction may be found in an advertisement for tractors in a 1921 issue of the magazine Successful Farming entitled “Keep the Boy in School”:

The pressure of urgent Spring work is often the cause of keeping the boy out of school for several months. It may seem necessary—but it isn’t fair to the boy! You are placing a life handicap in his path if you deprive him of education. In this age, education is becoming more and more essential for success and prestige in all walks of life, including farming.

Should you feel that your own education was neglected, through no fault of yours, then you naturally will want your children to enjoy the benefits of a real education—to have some things you may have missed.

With the help of a Case Kerosene Tractor it is possible for one man to do more work, in a given time, than a good man and an industrious boy, together, working with horses. By investing in a Case Tractor and Ground Detour Plow and Harrow outfit now, your boy can get his schooling without interruption, and the Spring work will not suffer by his absence.

Keep the boy in school—and let a Case Kerosene Tractor take his place in the field. You’ll never regret either investment.⁵²