The Silver Lining of Child Labor

This is Sadie Pfeifer, a 9-year-old Cotton Mill Spinner from South Carolina. She was one of tens of thousands working in factories, fields, and mines across the world during the late 1800s early 1900s. There was a serious child labour problem in America and across the globe during this time. The 1900 federal census revealed that 1.75 million children (1/5th of children) <16 years old were working. Why? The industrial revolution catalyzed a huge demand for a cheap labour force to complete monotonous tiresome work for hours on end and relied on mostly poor hungry desperate families to fulfil this need.

Side Note: consider what the education revolution was built on, it relied upon and crafted a similar type of individual who was obedient, could take demands without question and perform rote tasks over and over again. Many believe this wasn’t coincidental and that our modern education system was built on preparing children to become obedient factory workers to facilitate the industrial revolutions workforce. This system appears to be built on preparing to train kids to sit for 6–9 hours a day, follow instructions and conform to set strict guidelines. And it worked, we got plenty of factory workers who were compliant and would put up with awful conditions all for a paycheck. So what is school for now? A question for another day.