Re: Diss would call it debate

Children can often be transposed from one environment to an entirely different one and even not speaking the languge will fit in and adapt readily - and appear much like other children.

I would say that argument talks about the flexibility and capability to learn that children have, and compares it favorably against the rigidity and lack of adaptability of adults. In which case, it's half a step to argue that adults only know about one thing, while children know about anything they meet. That would mean that adults are unreliable except for what they are used to; while children are anything they want to be.

:)

Not sure they had any "civil rights" to begin with and even in countries where children do work they might not be seen as having any particular "rights."

Sometimes it's hard to follow Dissident because he assumes at times some previous familiarity with arguments and concepts that have been repeated several times over at GC.

What Dissident means is that children did not have any less rights, de facto, than what they would have as an adult. Certainly there were, for instance, elite and lower class children; male and female children; Christian and Jewish children; White and Black children, and any other division that also existed among adults. But for each possible demographic subset, children did not, de facto, have less rights than an adult in the same station. (De jure, of course, you can argue about what today we would call civil, political or social rights; which may or may not have been recognized or depend on certain qualifications, some of which may have been in practice unavailable to children)

I'm not against children working at young ages but this mostly limits their education so would perhaps be seen more as limiting their freedom than many things might.

The more I know about education, the less I want any children involved with that.

I think the returns on education are, today, diminishing in every country, wildly overestimated, and not likely to climb back anytime soon, due to both social, cultural and economic reasons created by today's world.

That's not to say education is, directly, an evil. Yet it's certainly only a good, today, under limited conditions, and definitely a good of lesser value than popularly perceived.