The Puzzling Contradictions of Child Labor, Unemployment, and Education in Brazil

Abstract

Hugh Cunningham recently argued that in nineteenth-century Europe, social con trol was the major concern of authorities promoting both child labor and public education. This article examines this thesis for nineteenth-century São Paulo, Bra zil, using Portuguese legislation concerning orphans, cases of tutorship, criminal records, records of child labor from industries, and annual reports of São Paulo primary teachers. The evidence shows that child labor was regarded as educa tional both in the moral sense and to acquire skills for children age seven and older and that employers also valued child labor. The efforts to develop public educa tion, on the other hand, were hampered by the resistance of parents to sending their children to school rather than sending them to work or using them for chores at home. While social control was definitely an underlying agenda of elites in their ideas for popular education (since it was seen to prevent crime), the contribution of child labor to household economy was much more important from the perspec tive of average Brazilian families.

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