What Newt Gingrich would do with the children of the poor

WHEN Newt Gingrich, currently touted as the Republican front-runner for the presidential nomination of his party, sees a six-year-old playing computer games or hanging out in the playground, he gnashes his teeth and cries out that the lad should be swabbing school bathrooms and performing other functions of the janitorial art.

He told a Harvard audience not so long ago that child labour laws are "truly stupid," and schools should fire janitors and replace them with poor children.
 
Later he modified this to: "What if they became assistant janitors and their jobs were to mop the floor and clean the bathroom?" Then he compared putting the kids to work as janitors to a programme in Georgia that paid kids to read books.
 
Gingrich insists that his tots-to-janitors plan answers his latest national crisis: poor kids have no habit of work "unless it's illegal". Thus the former Speaker of the House updates Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, who said, "Give me the child until he is seven. Afterward anyone can have him." Let the infant hand receive the lifelong impress of the janitor's mop.
 
Gingrich, who recently admitted that his own childhood was comfortable, seems to have a problem with youth. Back in 1994, the Gingrich masterplan to shrink the welfare rolls was to ship the children of the poor off to orphanages.
 
Mind you, there's nothing more tonic that the occasional sight of a seven-year-old efficiently discharging business, or farming functions, normally regarded as reserved for adults.

Back in the early 1960s, when I traveled from time to time to eastern Europe on the old Orient Express, as soon as we got past Vienna the corridors would fill up with children selling snacks, efficiently coping with six or seven different currencies, performing prodigies of mental arithmetic that would have defeated Einstein.
 
And liberal sermons about the glories of a humane education often ring false. For poor kids, the function of schools – particularly under the protocols of 'Reform' and 'National Purpose' so eagerly embraced by Bush/Obama – is to remind them that in terms of career potential and intellectual horizons they've already reached the end of the line. Gingrich's Janitor Scholarships would merely drive the message home.
 
The rationales of those attacking child labour laws haven't changed much down the decades. A glance at the histories of the town and country labourers in Britain, written by J.L. and Barbara Hammond early in the 20th century, provides vivid samples from the early phases of the industrial era.
 
As the 'new civilisation' of the industrial age took hold, reformers fought futilely, down the decades, against appalling cruelties, particularly in the coalmines and coal fire chimneys. The first report of the Commission on the Employment of Children and Young Persons in 1832 told of children working as "trappers," opening and shutting the doors guiding drafts of air through the mine; as "fillers" loading the skips when the men had hewn out the coal; and as "pushers" or "hurriers" shoving or pulling the carts along.
 
"The trappers generally sat in a little hole, made at the side of the door, holding a string in their hand, for twelve hours, usually in the dark." In the West Riding of Yorkshire, hurrying or pushing the carts was done by girls – in the words of the report, "Chained, belted, harnessed like dogs in a go-kart, black, saturated with wet, and more than half naked – crawling on their hands and feet, and dragging their heavy loads behind them – they present an appearance indescribably disgusting and unnatural."

In many mines, the main gates were from 24 inches to 30 inches high and some parts of the tunnels were only 18 inches in height. Boys began as trappers at the age of six and ·