NO TIME FOR SCHOOL, NO TIME FOR PLAY: THE STORY OF CHILD LABOR IN AMERICA.

By Rhoda and WilliamCahn '34. New York: William Messner,1972. Illustrated with Photographs. 64 pp.$4.50.

One fourth of all farm workers in the United States are younger than 16. In many states children still stoop and crawl through harvest crops in 100-degree heat for ten hours a day. Sometimes they must creep through fields with dangerous chemicals used to kill insects. Among the tens of thousands of children slaving in fields and on farms are some only six years old.

In this brief volume, dramatic with 37 photographs, Rhoda Cahn, a school psychologist specializing in communication techniques for children, and William Cahn, a prolific writer about industrial and labor problems, present evidence to show that problems facing vast number of working children continue to make headlines and that the struggle to abolish child labor throughout the United States is far from successful.

Historically minded, the Cahns include pithy and pitiful stories about how in earlier days the industrial system forced impoverished families to send their offspring not to school but into mines, textile mills, and factories where, though they worked full-time like adults, they were paid pittances. In some garment sweatshops little girls were fined for talking and even for smiling.

As late as 1938 only 28 states had passed a national regulation to end child labor (36 were necessary), and several million children were enslaved in factories and in mines, on fields and on farms. But in that year President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the bill to end child labor.

But not really "to end." Labor unions, school and religious organizations and concerned citizens are still at loggerheads with employers who resent flabby talk and prevent children from attending school. If children could only learn about honest sweat and be kept from the corrupting influences of permissive teachers, they would enjoy a better chance to grow up to become productive adults, healthy, sensible, and philoprogenitive. Freed from the curses of drugs and drink, they would applaud the Free Enterprise System which has made America the great and peace-loving country it is today, admired and respected by the whole world.