Child Labor & Educational Disadvantage – Breaking the Link, Building Opportunity. A Review by Gordon Brown

During the nineteenth century successive generations of social reformers mobilized to combat child labor – a practice that they cast as the moral equivalent of slavery. Their campaigns brought together political leaders, philanthropists, social movements and literary figures motivated by a simple but compelling goal: getting vulnerable children out of exploitative employment and into education. In large measure, they succeeded in consigning child labor to the history books of their nations. Yet across the world poorest countries millions of children continue to see their hopes, ambitions and talents blighted by child labor. Their human rights to dignity, education and a childhood free of exploitation are being systematically violated on a daily basis. As we approach the 2015 deadline for the international development goals, it is time for governments around the world to rekindle the spirit and the ambition of the great campaigns against child labor in the nineteenth century, and to consign the modern slavery of child labor to history.