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Darn kids these days just don't know how to get anything done! /s

This thought has a bunch of baked in assumptions that come from your own biases - we certainly have not stood still as a country since 1945. And I don't think shucking oysters or planting crops at age ten would help anyone be a better programmer or physicist or really anything other than manual labor.

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Well in my opinion the kids who were working in factories were working on the latest tech. It most definitely sucked and was horrible but the experiences would have prepared them for what the US needed.

I think the equivalent today would be forcing kids to do tech work, as we are out of the industrial age and into the Information Age. But tech work isn’t dirty and going to kill you so there is less incentive to force it on marginalized groups.

That’s why I think it was maybe just a perfect storm of circumstances.

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