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

In many countries the coup de grâce was legislation that made schooling compulsory and thus made child laborers conspicuously illegal. Figure 15-9 shows that the proportion of children in the labor force in England was halved between 1850 and 1910, before child labor was outlawed altogether in 1918, and the United States followed a similar trajectory.

Figure 15-9: Child labor, 1850–2012

Sources: Our World in Data, Ortiz-Ospina & Roser 2016a, and the following. England: Percentage of children aged 10–14 recorded as working, Cunningham 1996. United States: Whaples 2005. Italy: Child work incidence, ages 10–14, Tonioli & Vecchi 2007. World ILO-EPEAP (International Labour Organization Programme on Estimates and Projections of the Economically Active Population): Child Labor, ages 10–14, Basu 1999. World ILO-IPEC (International Labour Organization International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour): Child Labor, ages 5–17, International Labour Organization 2013.

The graph also shows the precipitous decline in Italy, together with two recent time series for the world. The lines are not commensurable because of differences in the age ranges and definitions of “child labor,” but they show the same trend: downward. In 2012, 16.7 percent of the world’s children worked an hour a week or more, 10.6 percent engaged in objectionable “child labor” (long hours or tender age), and 5.4 percent engaged in hazardous work—far too many, but less than half the rate of just a dozen years before. Child labor, now as always, is concentrated not in manufacturing but in agriculture, forestry, and fishing, and it goes with national poverty, as both cause and effect: the poorer the country, the larger the percentage of its children who work.⁵³ As wages rise, or when governments pay parents to send their children to school, child labor plummets, which suggests that poor parents send their children to work out of desperation rather than greed.⁵⁴

As with other crimes and tragedies of the human condition, progress in ending child labor has been powered both by the global rise of affluence and by humanistic moral campaigns. In 1999, 180 countries ratified the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention. The “worst forms” that were banned include hazardous labor and the exploitation of children in slavery, human trafficking, debt bondage, prostitution, pornography, drug trafficking, and war. Though the International Labour Organization’s target of eliminating the worst forms by 2016 was not met, the momentum is unmistakable. The cause was symbolically ratified in 2014 when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Kailash Satyarthi, the activist against child labor, who had been instrumental in the adoption of the 1999 resolution. He shared the prize with Malala Yousafzai, the heroic advocate for girls’ education. And that brings us to yet another advance in human flourishing, the expansion of access to knowledge.

CHAPTER 16KNOWLEDGE

Homo sapiens, “knowing man,” is the species that uses information to resist the rot of entropy and the burdens of evolution. Humans everywhere acquire knowledge about their landscape, its flora and fauna, the tools and weapons that can subdue them, and the networks and norms that entangle them with kin, allies, and enemies. They accumulate and share that knowledge with the use of language, gesture, and face-to-face tutelage.¹

At a few times in history, people have hit on technologies that multiply, indeed, exponentiate, the growth of knowledge, such as writing, printing, and electronic media. The supernova of knowledge continuously redefines what it means to be human. Our understanding of who we are, where we came from, how the world works, and what matters in life depends on partaking of the vast and ever-expanding store of knowledge. Though unlettered hunters, herders, and peasants are fully human, anthropologists often comment on their orientation to the present, the local, the physical.² To be aware of one’s country and its history, of the diversity of customs and beliefs across the globe and through the ages, of the blunders and triumphs of past civilizations, of the microcosms of cells and atoms and the macrocosms of planets and galaxies, of the ethereal reality of number and logic and pattern—such awareness truly lifts us to a higher plane of consciousness. It is a gift of belonging to a brainy species with a long history.