Kids know no one but their peers. And all this gets worse the closer kids get to adulthood. We have created a separate society for adolescents, said Sheldon White, professor of psychology at Harvard. Maybe this ought to be reappraised. Maybe we ought to re-invent child labor.
Young people do work, as someone pointed out.
Look, for example, at what Paul Johnson, a British popular historian, wrote in The Birth of the Modern about what was accomplished in the years after 1815 by people who came from truly disadvantaged backgrounds, who went to work early and who had almost no formal education. Michael Faraday, the scientist, was born poor, the son of a Yorkshire blacksmith. He had no education other than a few years at a school for the poor, but as a bookbinder s apprentice he read the works he bound . . . John Otley, the geologist, had no education apart from village schooling and set up as a basket-maker. James Naysmith, the engineer, started as an apprentice coach painter.