Rage Against Feeding Kids To The Machine

Look, I don’t have time for political niceties bullshit. I’ve spent 16 years working with the kids everyone else gave up on.  The ones with trauma histories longer than their transcripts, the neurodivergent kids who need actual support systems, not “workforce readiness training.” And what’s happening right now in U.S. policy? It’s not about helping them. It’s about redefining what childhood even means so we can extract labor from bodies that should still be learning how to exist in the world.

The Pitch: “Career Readiness.” The Reality: Child Labor Rebranding.

Project 2025’s 2024/25 roadmap isn’t subtle about what it wants. They want to strip back federal child-labor protections. To open up hazardous industries like factories, slaughterhouses, heavy machinery to 16- and 17-year-olds with minimal safeguards. They want to call it “training.” And then get parental consent on a form. Then pretend that makes it okay. (Goodman, 2024) (The Heritage Foundation, 2023)

You know what that actually means for the kids I work with? The ones already struggling with executive function, impulse control, trauma responses? It means putting them in dangerous environments designed for adults with fully developed prefrontal cortexes and calling it “opportunity.” It means more injuries. More exploitation. More kids ground up by systems that see them as cheap labor instead of humans who deserve protection. (NEA, 2025)

And while this is happening, everything that used to exist to protect these kids like public education funding, disability services, therapeutic supports, safe learning environments is being gutted or reframed as “inefficient.” Schools become workforce pipelines. Teachers become labor brokers. My students with IEPs? Suddenly they’re “candidates for modified work training” instead of kids who need actual education and support. (AFSCME, 2024)

This isn’t about fixing broken schools. This is about abandoning the idea that childhood should exist at all.

What Actual Education Looks Like (Hint: It Ain’t This)

Countries that give a shit about kids don’t treat them like future labor units. They treat them like developing humans who need time, space, and support.

Finland gets this. Kids start formal schooling later, at age 7. They have minimal, if any, homework. I, personally, give no homework to my students. Teaching grounded in trust, creativity, relationship. Not test scores and “career prep.” Teachers are treated as trusted professionals, not data-entry machines, and certainly not as glorified babysitters. Student wellbeing isn’t an afterthought; it’s the foundation, as it should be.(Humanium, 2023) (Matias, 2019)

Finnish schools don’t look at a 14-year-old and think “warehouse employee.” They think “human who needs time to figure out who they are.”

Meanwhile in the U.S., we’re being sold “reform” that looks like: Can’t pay adults a living wage? Throw teenagers at the problem. School funding’s broken? Just pipeline kids directly into whatever low-wage work needs bodies. Call it “preparing them for the real world.”

That’s not education. That’s harvesting. It’s predatory. It’s just wrong.

Why This Destroys Therapeutic Education and the Most Vulnerable Kids

I work in a therapeutic day school. My students have been through shit most people can’t, and don’t want to, imagine. They need consistency, safety, adults who aren’t trying to commodify their trauma. When you turn schools into labor pipelines, here’s what happens:

• That exhausted 16-year-old working night shifts? They aren’t “learning responsibility.”  They are developing chronic stress patterns that’ll fuck up their nervous system for years, if not the rest of their life. (Andersen & Teicher, 2012) (Gunatilake et al., 2025)
• My student with an intellectual disability? Suddenly he’s “work-training eligible” for minimum-wage exploitation, not a kid who deserves skill-building in a supported environment. (Bartov, 2022)
• The girl I’m writing an FBA for because she’s been sexually abused and has severe trust issues? Now she’s potential labor pool fodder while the therapeutic supports she needs get defunded, and she has problems that could’ve been helped or prevented for the rest of her life. (Novo-Fernández et al., 2024)
• Me, the teacher who’s supposed to be running IEP meetings and teaching life skills? I become a “career counselor” pushing kids toward jobs they’re not ready for because that’s what the system demands. And the student’s suffer. (NCLD, 2025) (Lehr & Lange, 2003)
  

We lose care. We lose oversight. We lose the entire fucking point of what education is supposed to be.

This is About Power and Profit. Full Stop.

“More opportunities for youth” is corporate-speak for “we found a legal way to exploit minors.” Real opportunity looks like: stability, safety, education as a right not a transaction, supports that help kids develop into whole humans.

When politicians talk about “rebuilding the workforce,” ask them: Which kids are you planning to break? Which futures are you willing to sacrifice? What protections are you stripping?

Because this isn’t rebuilding. This is demolition. And nobody asked the people actually living in this house if they consented to the wrecking ball.

Newsflash: We do not. We do not consent. We do not want the wrecking ball. We do not want you near our house.

What We Actually Need: Investment in Actual Childhood

We don’t need fewer protections. We need protections that mean something:

• Fully funded public education — not privatized charter bullshit or “workforce partnerships” (Sohn, Park, & Jung, 2023) (First Focus on Children, 2024) (Imberman, 2011) (Adamson, 2016)
• Treat educators like professionals — not gig workers or compliance robots (RAND, 2025) (OECD, 2025)
• Expand protections for minors — especially in hazardous work, no loopholes
• Reinforce support systems for disabled kids, neurodivergent kids, traumatized kids — actual therapeutic services, not “modified work programs”
• Value human development over productivity metrics — because a 16-year-old’s job isn’t to generate profit; it’s to figure out who they want to become
  

Education should be about becoming fully human. Not becoming useful.

And if you want to argue with me about this? Come spend a week in my classroom first. Meet my kids. Hang out with them. Learn their favorite music, about their friends, listen to them laugh, color with them, play video games with them. Then look at their IEPs, their behavioral data, their trauma histories, their family history, their evaluations, their school history.

Then tell me they need “job training” more than they need safety, support, and adults who see them as whole people worth protecting.

I fucking dare you.