If you think the Great DeSanitizer’s scheme to water down the state’s child labor laws and put more Florida teenagers to work is just about filling jobs formerly held by illegal immigrants, think again.
Long before they jumped on Trump’s Deport The Illegals band wagon, the governor and his party were embarked on an even more ambitious campaign: Destroying public education in Florida.
Under the rallying cry of “parental choice” the GOP has been diverting billions of dollars away from public schools and into private and charter schools. As a result, school districts around the state will increasingly face painful choices: What schools to keep open and what schools to close.
Here in Alachua County, the school board recently learned that it will have $6.5 million less than budgeted due to declining enrollments. This at a time when the district has been expanding and modernizing many of its schools, thanks to voter-approved tax initiatives.
“Financially, we’re not in a good place right now,” board member Tina Certain told The Alligator this week.
And the GOP’s steady draining away of public school dollars isn’t the half of it. Over the past four years The Great DeSanitizer and his pet Legislature have steadily imposed censorship measures aimed at limiting what students can read, what their teachers can teach them and even what they can talk to each other about.
It’s almost as if the GOP has been on a deliberate campaign to dumb down public education in Florida.
So what has all that to do with the latest push to weaken child labor laws? Simply this:
Traditionally a public school education has been a pathway to economic opportunity, especially for children of low income families. Well-off families are always going to insure that their children get the best education possible – only now they are getting public dollars to help send their kids to the most selective schools.
And what about the kids left behind, to succeed or fail, in increasingly underfunded and dumbed-down public schools?
Those who do get full-time jobs – complements of relaxed child labor laws – will be more likely to eventually drop out of school altogether. Inevitably the demands of working long hours will clash with their ability to study, do homework and even stay awake in class.
To the extent this happens, it will achieve two Florida GOP goals:
1. More drop outs will mean even less funding for public schools and
2. The drop outs will form the vanguard of a poorly educated, low paid and thus easily exploitable work force.
Just like illegal immigrants, only not deportable.
The kind of jobs that illegal immigrants used to fill – cleaning hotel rooms, construction, processing chickens, picking crops and the like – will be deemed suitable for young Floridians who have little education, few opportunities and, thus, little choice.
And in a society where the gap between the haves and the have nots is forever widening, the last thing the haves want is a work force educated to exercise critical thinking skills.
“And what’s wrong with expecting our young people to be working part-time now? I mean, that’s how it used to be when I was growing up,” the anti-Ron has said.
Actually, teenagers are already able to work part time? What our political overlords are doing is modifying the rules so young people can work full-time. On night shifts. On school nights. Without mandatory breaks.
Talk about creating a new source of cheap labor to make life easier for the haves.
FreeGNV 