Kirkus Reviews QR Code
YOUR RIGHTS, PAST AND PRESENT by Jim Haskins

YOUR RIGHTS, PAST AND PRESENT

By

Pub Date: Sept. 1st, 1975
Publisher: Hawthorn

Not another handbook in the vein of Loeb and Maloney's Your Legal Rights as a Minor (1974) but an overview of problems in juvenile justice, education and child labor which often echoes the children's liberation sentiments of John Holt's Escape from Childhood. Haskins questions whether many developments intended to protect minors--compulsory education, exclusion from the labor force, closed school records (now, as he notes, no longer legal) even the juvenile court system and the detention home--haven't in many cases worked against their best interests. The arguments are generally moderate: should a young person be forced to attend a public school that is teaching him nothing; should a youth who needs money be forbidden to earn it. However, the counter-arguments are often sloughed off, especially the fear that permitting child labor would lead to exploitation and deprive poor and minority group children of a chance for education. Far from a full discussion of the issues, this is nevertheless a fairly circumspect manifesto and a good starting point for the kind of lively debate that Haskins never quite gets going on his own.