A school district was caught exploiting children
And invented child slavery?
Yesterday, the Breathitt school district in the United States officially confirmed that it views slave child labor as a means of making money.
Less than two months ago, teachers from this district were praising the struggle of women for rights and freedoms; less than three months ago, they were discussing the liberation of African Americans from the yoke of slavery — and then they go and disgrace themselves like this.
Just imagine declaring to the whole country: children are our property, and for damaging that property we will sue IT giants for millions.
Maybe the history of the state influenced this district, and in Kentucky they believe you can be on the side of the North while still considering slavery normal, while the president is guided by Abraham Lincoln’s words: “I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky.”
Or maybe it is simply greed and the desire to put almost 30 million dollars into their own pocket, since taxpayers’ money has been spent and they need more. Be that as it may, as of May 30, 2026, the district had bitten off $27 million from large IT companies such as Meta, Alphabet, ByteDance, and Snap.
Officially, the text of the agreement says that the money was paid because the district spent excessive funds on psychological support for students who were so absorbed in using social media that their anxiety, depression, self-harm, and bullying worsened — and the school was forced to spend resources dealing with the consequences.
Let’s reconstruct the story in order:
IT companies created products that schoolchildren like.
Schoolchildren used the products they liked a lot, often during lessons that were far from making them want to consume those lessons.
According to district employees, children suffered from using YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and other apps where things are much more interesting than at school.
Instead of fighting for the quality of teaching and for students’ attention through more interesting lessons, the district spent public money on psychologists, apparently believing that psychology is a more functional and useful tool than math or English.
Let’s assume for a second that schoolchildren really were harmed by the actions of IT giants. For now, let’s not discuss whether that is true or not.
Who, in that case, should receive compensation — the victims who used a defective product? Or the district?
To make it easier, let’s use examples from criminal practice.
You were robbed and beaten on the street. Who should receive the compensation — you, the victim, or the police?
Your neighbor set up a barbecue next to your wooden fence, failed to watch the fire, and your house burned down. Who should receive the money — you or the firefighters?
A pharmaceutical company released a drug that caused your legs to stop working. To whom should pharma send the money — to you or to the hospital that treated you, with your own money?
Suppose IT companies harmed the psychological health of children. Who should receive compensation — the victims, or those who happened to be standing nearby and paying themselves salaries from public funds?
Today I checked: 1,671 students study in the Breathitt district. Take the $27 million that the district squeezed out of IT and divide it by every student. We get that each child deserves $16,000 in compensation. But they will not receive it. And who will? Correct: the one who treats children as property.
If we reject the assumption that the district treats children as property, then there is not a single legal justification left for why the district is entitled to $27 million. But as soon as we take off the rose-colored glasses, everything falls into place. Children are school property, exactly like a board or a metal locker, and if some bad companies scratched the board and bent the locker, then under the law they owe a fine — be so kind as to compensate for the damage caused.
Only from this point of view can one explain why compensation of $16,000 per schoolchild went not to the “injured” child, but to his slave owner.
One could imagine that the Breathitt district, after watching Meta create virtual worlds and Alphabet create artificial intelligence, also decided to show off some innovation and invent child slavery. However, even here, it turns out, the idea was stolen.
Children have been considered property more or less always. With variations, of course, in who was considered the owner — parents, the community, the planter, or the state.
In ancient Rome, a father had the legal right to:
• Sell his child into slavery — in the early period, up to three times before the father’s power was annulled.
• Decide whether a newborn lived or died — if the child had defects or the family was poor, he could legally be “exposed” on the street to die.
• Execute an adult son for disobedience.
In Sparta, newborns were examined by a council of elders. If a child seemed weak, he was thrown into the Apothetae ravine. The child belonged not to the parents, but to the state, which took boys into barracks at the age of seven.
In the Middle Ages, the children of the poor were an investment and free labor. From the age of five to seven, they worked in the fields alongside adults. And in the upper classes, children were instruments of diplomacy. Infants were betrothed for the sake of alliances, and at the age of 10–12, girls were married off and sent into other families, where they became the property of a new dynasty.
With the arrival of capitalism and factory production, nothing changed. Parents had every right to rent out their children to factory owners and take all their wages. Laws protecting children’s rights simply did not exist — legally, these were relations between an owner and his property.
As the state grew stronger and the power of the family in society degraded, children began to be taken away from parents for mandatory labor every weekday, from 7–8 in the morning until 3–5 in the afternoon. And, naturally, nobody started paying parents for this — why pay if you are the state? Who is going to dare tell you otherwise?
The state model of free and coercive child labor became so widespread and ordinary that, in public consciousness, it began to be associated with the norm and with the most favorable way for children to spend their time, almost a blessing, and even came to be perversely called a “right to education,” which is just as ridiculous as “the slave’s right to pick cotton on the plantation” or “the wife’s right in a patriarchal society to obey her husband.”
I would not be surprised if you say: how can one compare slave labor in the fields with sitting at a desk, since we send children to school “for their own good,” and they should generally be grateful to us? Usually, after the word “grateful,” adults add “little bastards,” but let’s leave that part out.
Here is the definition from Wikipedia: “Slavery entails forced labor, with the slave’s place of work and residence determined by the party holding them in slavery.”
Can children freely choose where to live and leave their parents? No.
Can children independently decide which school to attend and which subjects to study today? No.
Can children choose paid work instead of school? No.
If you have an object at home with four legs, and you eat from it, it does not matter what you call it — even if you call it a podium, in reality it is a table.
If for 13 years a person is deprived of the ability to choose their place of residence and work, you can call it a happy childhood as much as you like, but by definition it will be slavery.
Humanity develops in a spiral, making the same mistakes and stepping on the same rake again and again. Instead of recognizing the child’s right to receive money for work, as well as the freedom to choose a place of work, people decided to create one single place where children can work — without even a chance to choose the building in which this slave labor will take place.
We are often told that slavery in the United States was abolished thanks to the Civil War, and that the wonderful North spread humanity across all of America. However, we should not forget that slavery in the North was abolished because it was economically inefficient: free people work much more effectively because they can choose work they like, and can also change employers if that employer has become completely arrogant.
Nor should we forget that women’s victory in the struggle for rights conveniently coincided with the moment when industry needed additional educated workers, and there was nowhere else to get them.
Slave labor is extremely inefficient, no matter whom you enslave: people from Africa, women, or children.
Is it even worth writing that factories of knowledge — schools — based on forced labor produce very few educated graduates? It does not matter what carrots or sticks are used in slavery: the slave labor of schoolchildren can never become effective, no matter what EdTech or AI is called into service, and no matter what best professional development is ordered for the overseers of slaves.
The Breathitt school district is only the first swallow of lawsuits against IT giants. About 1,200 school districts, without any embarrassment, have done the same thing, although the right step in their place would be to think about how to turn child labor from slave labor into legal labor.
Yes, it is difficult. Yes, everyone around you will call you idiots because you refuse to collect money from social networks for damaging your property. And, really, who in their right mind gives up property? But schoolchildren, unlike a board or a metal locker, will become someone after school: some will become surgeons, some police officers, and some politicians. And instead of caring about their development as individuals, you treated them as property. So enjoy receiving a removed kidney instead of a healthy one, planted drugs from a police officer, and a politician who climbs into your pocket with new taxes.
At our school, we did not hire additional psychologists to resist the “corrupting” influence of social media on children. Instead, every day we talked to them and tried to understand how we could build a normal working space for them together — a place where they could come of their own will, choose what to do and when to do it, and choose which classmates to work with. Believe me, it is not difficult, and most importantly, it gives exactly the results that supervisory authorities expect from you. Even simply allowing a child to talk during a lesson and choose a work partner produces a twofold increase in final math test scores.
Every day, as the founder of an educational startup, I talk to superintendents and other district administrators. I try to explain to them how it works.
History tells us that planters were against improving the productivity of slave labor — especially against machines in the fields. Men who own their wives as property are not eager to buy them dishwashers.
What do you think school district leaders tell me about improving the quality of math instruction in school? Do they need it?
Of course, not everyone is the same. I know adequate superintendents whose hearts ache for their students. The only question is: does yours?