The limits of policy

Abstract

This article uses public documents and first-hand accounts of late 19th and early 20th centuries child life to examine attempts by public policymakers in the United States and New Zealand to change the quality of rural child life in those countries through compulsory schooling and other related measures. These attempts, however, largely failed due to the demands of the farming economy and the unwillingness of public officials to go to extraordinary lengths on behalf of farm children, as opposed to urban children. Rural children's lives would be changed, not by policy, but by technological developments and the vagaries of the farm economy.

Keywords:

• Children
• Rural
• Agriculture
• Child labor
• Child labor law
• Education
• Compulsory schooling
• United States
• New Zealand

Acknowledgements

I thank the NZUSEF for research support, and Jeanine Graham, Kate Hunter, and Claire Toynbee for their insights and encouragement.

Notes

1 There are some notable exceptions to this rule. An early work is Chayanov's (1966) The theory of peasant economy. A very useful recent book is Industrious Children: Work and Childhood in the Nordic Countries 1850–1990 (de Coninck-Smith, Sandin, & Schrumpf, 1997), which examines children's labors in both rural and urban context. There are also helpful works both in the literature of the United States and New Zealand. The American literature on rural childhood includes West's (1989) especially useful Growing up with the country: childhood on the Far Western frontier, and Hampsten's (1991) Settler's children: growing up on the great plains. Zelizer (1994), in Pricing the priceless child: the changing social value of children, briefly examines the political confusion surrounding children's labors on their parents' farms. Some of the most useful sources on this topic in New Zealand include portions of Arnold's (1997) Settler Kaponga 1881–1914: A frontier fragment of the Western World, and Toynbee's (1995) Her work and his: family, kin and community in New Zealand, 1900–1930. Also useful are Graham's (1992a, 1992b) articles on rural childhood, particularly “The country child” in The New Zealand Genealogist.

2 McGeorge (1983, p. 18) argues that challenging dairy-farming parents over the labors of their children was never seriously considered because it would have fatally undermined the foundations of New Zealand's new and lucrative dairy industry.

3 One government report claimed that large numbers of children leaving school were choosing to remain in agricultural pursuits. “The increase in the percentage of boys from purely secondary schools proceeding to farming occupations is particularly gratifying, in view of the charge so often made that schools of this type are creating a bias from farming pursuits” (Atmore, 1929, p. 14).

4 This same concern is apparent in the Amish population in modern America. Amish children only attend school through the eighth grade. Amish parents reason that this is all their children need to undertake their preferred occupation — farming. They also fear that the additional exposure to worldly ideas might cause their children to leave the faith and their rural communities, either of which would be disastrous in their opinion (see Hostetler, 1993; Schwieder, 1975).