The Road to Splitsville: HOW YOU'RE GONNA KEEP 'EM DOWN ON THE FARM

The Newsletter for Subscribers to THE SPLIT

Remember finishing eighth grade?

You were thirteen, or maybe fourteen. Remember how physically robust and emotionally mature you were? Remember how you had learned pretty much all the knowledge and skills you’d need for the rest of your life? Remember how, if your parents had told you that your schooling was over, and that, from then on, you’d be working full-time on a farm, you’d have thought: Sure!

Those are the memories the Republican legislature in the great state of Indiana is trying to create with a bill they passed in January. It allows children who have completed the eighth grade to obtain their parents’ “permission” to end their formal education and to work eight hours a day, 40 hours a week, doing agricultural labor.

Don’t believe it? Pfft. That’s because you still think we’re all in the twentieth—or is it the twenty-first?—century, whereas in Indiana they’ve managed to drag each other back to the nineteenth. But wait. Let Wonkette’s own Robyn Pennachia, writing in January 1824 2024, stun you with the deets:

 Earlier this month, as first reported by More Perfect Union, Rep. (Joanna) King proposed a bill (HB 1062) that would amend Indiana labor law to allow kids to drop out of school after the eighth grade and work full-time, 40 hours a week, on farms. Not even their own family farms (though that’s cool starting at 12!), but also on large corporate farms.

(When she says “not even” we think she means “not just.” It’s a reasonable mistake, for someone as appalled and outraged as we are in the face of this news.)

A reporter for the Indiana Capital Chronicle says that a different bill (HB 1093) includes language from HB 1062 to the effect that “a child who is at least 14 and has completed eighth grade can work during traditional work hours with parent approval.” Apparently this bill includes an amendment “largely aimed at” Mennonite and Amish families, who actually do live on farms and whose children typically do drop out of school after eighth grade. But it’s not restricted to them or their farms.

It's one thing to grow up as a member of an ideologically and religiously rural, agrarian society, like the Mennonites and the Amish, in which your identity as a farm worker is inseparable from your identity as a member of a family and a community. It’s another to be, so to speak, “farmed out” at age 14 by your parents, to work on an industrial farm for which the only religion is profit.

But go back to the language of HB 1062: the “child…can work…with parent approval.” This raises the question of who, exactly, is seeking the employment at issue: the child (who is still two years short of being a licensable driver)? Is middle-school grad Johnny importuning his folks to let him quit school so he can pick Romaine lettuce for 40 hours a week? If so, Johnny is a naïve little pisher not competent to ask such a thing. He may hate doing geometry homework and reading about the Continental Congress, but no halfway sensible parent (regardless of their own educational history) would grant the request. Even 18-year-olds, who think they know everything, don’t know anything.

Besides, even the most recalcitrant 14-year-old student would rather hang with friends, explore sex, and try to fake their way through school, than sweat in a field all day. So we don’t think it’s the kid’s idea. Call us cynical, but we think it’s the (Republican) parents, who can, if they don’t despise it as being “elitist,” take or leave book learning, but find mighty tempting that sub-minimum wage young John will bring in every week.

And isn’t it their due? Haven’t they, for fourteen years, gone to all the trouble and expense of housing and clothing and feeding the little ingrate? Why shouldn’t he be “allowed” (or forced) to ditch this self-indulgent, fancy-pants waste of time—studying computers and Spanish and composition and molecules—and begin to earn an honest living by lubricating combines or sorting potatoes?

The real Split, we are told by them what knows, is not so much between blue and red states, but between urban population centers and rural, agricultural areas. The former comprise the bulk of the country’s population and the latter occupy most of the country’s land. Of course the contrast between city and rural life—between town and country—goes back millennia, to the creation of the city. Each has always needed the other. There is no food without farms, and there are no cities without food. And there is nothing wrong with young people working, and living their lives, on farms.

But 14-year-olds aren’t “young people.” They’re barely-pubescent teenage children. And any child whose education stops after 8^th grade can barely be said to be educated at all. Does this matter? It may not to “society,” and it probably won’t to the parents, and it surely won’t to the Republicans who are promoting these laws, but it sure as fuck will to the kid.

Mennonite and Amish teens may want—or think they want; or are told they want—to live in a deliberately-contrived pre-modern society, and they’ll have an entire community to support that, for better or worse. But what about the others? What about the kids channeled, via their parents’ “permission,” into a Dickensian sub-world of grueling labor and intellectual starvation? What about the kids whose understanding of the world (let alone themselves) stops before ninth grade?

The Indiana bill was passed 8-3, with all the committee’s Democrats voting against it. Which is to say it is entirely the creation of Republicans. Go be surprised. The “pro-life” party of Christian America can’t wait to turn Indiana’s 14-year-olds into campesinos or full-time agricultural industrial laborers. Why? For the money, stupid!

And, we might add, for the ignorance. If The Split ever does take place, this will have been part of what led up to it: an irreconcilable difference between two cultures. One holds that education, apart from its intrinsic humanistic value, is necessary for a person to create a decent life now, today, currently, in the century in which we actually live (which, according to our calendar, is the twenty-first); the other, fearing change and idealizing the old ways, puts blind faith in parental authority, sees education as threatening traditional beliefs, and thinks children should be seen and not heard==and blissfully, ignorantly, employed.