Neil Reynolds Social policy scholar John Richards says educators should invest more money in sports programmes as one way to keep more young males in school. Although Canadas dropout rate has fallen in the past two decades (from 16.6 percent in 1990 to 8.5 percent in 2010), it remains unacceptably high for three groups: Some immigrant students (especially Haitians and Jamaicans), many aboriginal students (both on-reserve and off-reserve) and young males (who now drop out at almost twice the rate of young females). Professor Richards says educators need to experiment aggressively to find ways to keep more of these students in class long enough to get high-school diplomas. In an e-brief for the CD Howe Institute, Professor Richards, of Simon Fraser University, describes the high-school diploma as a low rung on the educational ladder, but still an essential one. The employment rate for young people without diplomas, he says, is 40 percent; with them, its 65 percent - meaning that dropouts are apt to live difficult lives with lengthy bouts of unemployment and poverty. Professor Richards says that the problem is the destructive legacy bequeathed to children in groups characterised by poverty and cultural traditions that do not stress formal schooling. These children exhibit a worrisome lack of educational achievement compared with the Canadian average. Canadas students performed well, on average, in the most recent OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report card: Placing near the top in reading, math and science scores of 15-year-old students in 60 countries. Its weakest students, though, performed poorly when compared with the weakest students (the lowest quintile) around the world: 28tth in reading, 25th in math and 20th in science. Children who drop out start falling behind by Grade 3, Professor Richards says, which suggests that pre-kindergarten programmes might help - though, he says, they are probably not helpful to children from stable, middle-class, two-parent families. Studies of Quebecs celebrated $7-a-day daycare programme, he says, show the highly subsidised programme delivers little or no cognitive benefits for most children. Professor Richards says other studies show that the segregation of low-performance children in racial or cultural clusters is not helpful, either. (Much better, he says, to keep these children exposed to expectations of academic success.) Implicitly, in his call for aggressive experimentation, Professor Richards concludes that no solution has yet been found for children bereft of the tradition of formal schooling, either in Canada or elsewhere. But perhaps these children shouldnt be in school, as now defined, at all. Perhaps, school makes things worse. Around the world, on average, 20 percent of children drop out. For a significant number of kids, school just doesnt work. Whats the alternative? As John Wesley, the 18th century founder of Methodism, argued, it is real work. As an aggressive experiment, why not try child labour? Although now corrupted by iconic images of adolescent Victorian chimney sweeps and wrenching pictures of young Third World sweatshop labourers, child labour has an honourable history that extends back to the apprenticeships of the Middle Ages. In more recent history, think young farmhands, vocational schools and co-op programmes in colleges and universities. All inspire a culture of learning. Teachers still honour the concept of child labour: Homework. And child workers sounds quite different from child labourers. But we are not talking of returning children to Dickenss dark satanic mills. We are talking different ways of learning. One of the most persuasive advocates of child labour is German sociologist Manfred Liebel. In his 2004 book, A Will of Their Own: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Working Children, he argues that educators should put children to work: Take the hazard out of the work, not the child. With years of study behind him, he celebrates children as young adults with a capacity - indeed, a compulsion - to work. Professor Liebel says formal schooling robs some children of pride and self-respect by causing them to fail. He says, further, that some children prefer real work and, given half a chance, will voluntarily choose it over classroom work. He is almost certainly right. It is not more playtime that dropout children need. It is honest-to-God work time.