History students will hardly miss child labor during the industrial revolution essay. Does it ring a bell in your mind? The Industrial revolution! That suggests that child labor is not a twentieth-century practice; it was their way before some of us were born.
It, therefore, implies that there is a rich source of materials in case you are to write a child labor argument essay. Get that anxiety off and now focus your labor on this post.
A Brief History Of Child Labor
From time immemorial, children have been reported to involve in labor activities even at a tender age. The Agrarian and Industrial revolution, however, intensified the demand for child labor all over the world.
Children would engage in industrial operations such as operating power-driven machines. Of course, some of these tasks were light, but others were heavy for these children. Others would work on farms as harvesters or gardeners with little or no pay at all. The labor was at the expense of them not attending school.
Now, this is where a child labor problem-solving essay would come in handy. Such articles have helped in stopping this practice all over the world.
Child Labor Essay Outline
The outline of an essay on child labor is the same as that of any other persuasive essay. It starts with a fascinating introduction, elaborate 5-paragraph body, and a commemorable conclusive paragraph.
The introduction should create curiosity in your reader’s mind concerning the problem at hand. Questions that can help you kick start your paper include:
- What is the specific problem?
- The driving force behind choosing that specific problem
- Where the problem is prevalent
In the child labor essay body, bring out a clear picture of the problem by expounding on it. You can use life experiences and available facts and statistics that are authentic as your evidence. Provide working and realistic solutions to the problem, if any. Let your reader be able to see your stance, whether you support or are against it through the examples and evidence provided.
The conclusion involves a summary and possible solutions. Make a restatement of the thesis statement to affirm where you stand on this problem.
Causes of Child Labour
Briefly let us see some of the reasons for child labor all over the world:
- Poverty
- Cultures and traditions
- Inability to access education
- The economic state of a country
Among many other factors, these are some of the reasons why children engage in child labor. A persuasive essay about child labor would, therefore, exhaustively deal with these causes and offer a way out.
The most exciting section of this post is now here with us.
Sample Essay On Child Labor in Literature
“Child Labor” argues that the advent of 18th and 19th century literature exposing the horrors of child labor forced a shift in social awareness of the critical issue, especially in Great Britain, where the Industrial Revolution pressured children into the workforce under deplorable conditions with little regulation. Focusing on 18th and 19th century poems and novels from authors such as Charles Dickens and poets like Elizabeth Browning and William Blake, “Child Labor” uses the Marxist Theory to show how innovations like the printing press brought literature to the lower and middle classes (previously reserved for the upper class), and it was this widespread availability that enabled authors like Dickens to bring their messages to the mainstream. These works in turn influenced the social awareness of child labor, leading to later regulations and provisions for children employed in the workforce.
Using the Marxist theory, we see that as the economic imbalance grew through the continued increase in industry, so did the economic need for families to sustain a minimum quality of life. This meant that children from poor families were often called upon to work and support the family at a very young age. It was common to see children from the lower classes working fifteen to twenty hour days while their upper class counterparts attended school and pursued leisure activities, further separating the division of wealth, resources, and labor. Furthermore, as industry leaders saw this shift in the labor force, many sought to exploit this sudden influx of cheap labor, and, with no governmental regulations in place, children often endured extremely harsh working conditions for little pay.
As the potential for life-threatening work conditions increase, so did the health risks for children working in industry. “Child Labor” explores not only the division of classes through the Marxist Theory but also the differences in gender with the Gender Theory, showing how female writers of the era portray the child labor issue differently from males. I hesitate to perpetuate a stereotype in claiming that women of the era portray the crisis with more of an emotive, passionate plea, but this is certainly the case with Browning’s poem, “The Cry of the Children,” where she relies on pathos to deliver her main point. This gender exploration segues into the modern perspective, which forms the basis of the main argument, with the work of Shyima Hall, whose 2014 novel, Hidden Girl, shows us that, while Industrial Revolution-era poetry and fiction did bring about social change, child labor is still very much a real social problem today, especially in economically-challenged societies, where the rich upper classes still exploit the poor.
Sold to an Egyptian upper class family to pay off a debt, Hall spent four years working in abusive and degrading conditions until she was discovered when the family moved to California. I use Hall’s work to critique the notion that child labor, and in this case slavery, is a thing of the past. Clearly it still exists, and yet it is hidden behind the scenes in today’s culture. The reasons behind this veiled treatment of an obvious modern social problem are complex. Since it is not happening as much in mainstream, First-World culture, as it was during the Industrial Revolution, there is a tendency to disregard the issue and mitigate it as a relic from another era. Hall’s work shows us that we have not done enough to eradicate this social problem, and perhaps by writing about it, as Dickens and Browning did, and as Hall does now, we can once again bring the issue to light.
20 Amazing Topic Ideas for a Child Labor Essay
Coming up with a topic on such a subject may be difficult, but this informative post has a solution to that. You can try the following ideas:
- How far have we come in combating child labor?
- Who is to blame for children working, and why?
- The role of child protection agencies in combating this menace
- Essay about the causes and effects of child labor
- Forms of child labor today
- Relationship between economy and child labor
- Domestic violence as a cause of children working
- How debt bondage has contributed to the rise of child labor
- What jobs can children do that are not hazardous to them?
- Dimensions of child labor today
- Is society to blame for children working?
- Role of education in reducing cases of child labor
- Child abuse and child labor: The relationship
- A study of the jobs where child labor is prevalent
- The purpose of the media in curbing child labor
- At what age should one start to work?
- Child trafficking: A significant cause of child labor
- A case study of the laws about child labor
- The history of child labor and the progress made
- Is every kind of child labor exploitative?
Such a paper may involve a lot of emotions, especially if one has been through it. Every word used should, therefore, not be provocative to the point of opening up the healing wounds of the victims.
Child Labor Essay Explained
An essay on child labor has never been this easy. It is one informative paper that, if written to the required standards, can win a Nobel Peace Prize award. And of course, all you need to achieve that has already been described above.
What’s keeping you from grabbing that prize now?
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