Is Your Sixth Grader Ready for The Third Shift?

There's an article in the most recent National Review, a conservative news publication and web site, Kevin D. Williamson has an article "Newt's Right: Put Kids To Work". At first I thought it was a spoof, but then I realized it wasn't that at all. It was a call to eliminate the Child Labor Laws. His contention is that Newt Gingrich was right about allowing companies to hire children. Now I'm not going to take a look back at the bad old days of child exploitation before the Child Labor Laws. Instead I'm wondering how putting these children back to work will do any of the things we need for the 21st century. Take for instance  the fact that the jobs of the future will require specific skills that will, for the most part, require special educational experiences that the companies aren't willing to teach. They want their new hires to have those skills before being hired. This isn't to suggest that only colleges can provide these skills. Nearly all technology schools and trade schools teach these skills. I believe that some high schools should begin to offer these skills as well. Especially in poorer urban neighborhoods and even rural areas where the means to pay for additional schooling may not be high. I do think that companies need to work with such schools to be sure to provide the needed skills.
Mr Williamson suggests that half of all children just don't have the IQ necessary to benefit from higher education. Is that right? Is America truly a country of half dummies? And just who will decide which children will go to college? Will it be only those whose parents have college degrees? He never looks at the Trade Schools. One of our biggest problems is that other countries are ahead of us in math and sciences. Is he suggesting that somewhere around the 4th or 5th grades, I suppose, we select those who will attend college and put the rest to work doing janitorial work in the schools as Mr Gingrich proposed?  The second reason I find fault with Mr Williamson's thesis is that once trained to handle these menial tasks, will they be prepared to learn new skills as the old ones are taken over by technology like robotics?  What he doesn't seem to realize is that schools of higher learning will also need to train young people in how to think for themselves and to be able to reintegrate into new technology quickly. Third, the ideas he proposes will encourage dropouts from school at earlier and earlier ages. It would truly be the dumbing  down of America. An idea that would serve to bring back lower and lower paying jobs. Those are not the jobs Americans want nor is it what Americans deserve.