askchapo

A general prohibition of child labor is incompatible with the existence of large-scale industry and hence an empty, pious wish. Its realization -- if it were possible -- would be reactionary, since, with a strict regulation of the working time according to the different age groups and other safety measures for the protection of children, an early combination of productive labor with education is one of the most potent means for the transformation of present-day society. [Marx - Critique of the Gotha Programme]

In Capital Marx explains at length:

As meager as the education clauses in the Factory Acts generally seem, they did make elementary schooling into a condition of child labor. Their success showed for the first time that it is possible to combine education and gymnastics with manual labor, and thus that is possible to combine manual labor with education and gymnastics. The factory inspectors soon learned (while interviewing schoolmasters) that even though the factory children spent half as much time in the classroom as the regular students, they were learning just as much—often even more. “This can be accounted for by the simple fact that, with only being at school for one half the day, they are always fresh, and nearly always ready and willing to receive instruction. The system on which they work, half manual labour and half school, renders each employment a rest and a relief to the other; and consequently, both are far more congenial to the child, than would be the case were he kept constantly at one. It is quite clear that, a boy who has been at school all morning cannot (in hot weather particularly), cope with one who comes fresh and bright from his work.” We find further supporting evidence in Senior’s 1863 speech at the Social Science Congress in Edinburgh. Among other things, he demonstrates here that the monotonous, unproductive, overlong school day of children in the middle and more advanced classes adds to the teacher’s workload for no good reason: “We are employing labour on the part of our masters, and time, health, and energy on the part of our children, not only fruitlessly, but absolutely mischievously.” From the factory system, as Robert Owen shows in detail, sprouts the bud of the education of the future. Productive labor will be combined with education and gymnastics for all children over a certain age, not only because this is a way to increase social production, but also because it is the only way to produce fully developed human beings.

The polytechnic and agronomical schools that arose spontaneously on the foundation of large-scale industry were one moment in this process of transformation. Another was the “ecole d’enseignement professionnel,” where workers’ children have received some instruction in technology and also learned how to use different instruments of production. If the Factory Act, that minimal first concession extracted from capital, managed only to combine elementary education with factory labor, there can be no doubt that when the working class seizes political power, as it inevitably will, technological instruction of both the practical and theoretical kind will win a place in workers’ schools.