The headline should read:

Presidential Candidate Eager for Gilded Age‘s Return

Instead it reads:

Newt Gingrich: Child Labor Laws Are ‘Stupid’

Gingrich’s position is, of course, more nuanced than it

sounds. And you have to give him credit for this characteristic bit of brainstorming on his part. But, as is always the case with this presidential candidate, his attraction to novel ideas is rarely balanced by those red flashing “warning!” signs the rest of us seem to get.

Warning signs that remind us of what child labor laws protect, what the culture was that formed them, and how perpetually necessary they are.

Or warning signs that say more specifically, “Newt! Calling them ‘stupid’ will get you only a little support and some buzz, but a whole bunch of hate mail.” Like the voice that reminds you that maybe there is more than one way to see something.

What Gingrich is suggesting has zero to do with child labor laws, and I’m pretty sure he knows it. I am pretty sure there is nothing legally stopping schools from innovative programs to encourage student participation in maintenance; nothing legally preventing an industrious principal from having sixth graders scrub toilets and “begin the process of rising”. What is stopping this from happening is that we are trying to train our kids to be better students, focused on academic success and most parents would see this, not as important character-building, but as punishment, or worse cheap labor.

Gingrich has two reasons to float such an idea. The simple one is to prove his supposed outside-the-box bona fides. The other is that he doesn’t want to support those employees of the school system that clean toilets daily, particularly if they are unionized. He sees that work as ripe for outsourcing, innovation, and efficiency: by getting students to do it.

He is taking a howitzer to a paintball game; or worse, a howitzer to a game of chess. And he knows it. He wants to seem innovative by removing one of the most humane accomplishments in American history. That seems like the definition of a bad idea.

[UPDATE: Check out this article I just found refuting Gingrich’s suggestion that kids should even be doing this work: Newt Gingrich’s Cavalier View of Janitorial Work Challenged By Facts]