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It is important to add that the school apparently played little role in shaping either career expectations or career patterns of most people in the early nineteenth century. To be sure, elementary schooling was certainly a prerequisite for that higher education which distinguished the holders of high-status occupations. But the expansion of primary schooling did not open up access to higher education. And in the early decades of the nineteenth century, at least, the differentiation between access to elementary and to higher instruction was compatible with (if not an actual result of) elite thinking and official policy... [T]he impetus for school reform was a rather contradictory one. On the one hand, reformers felt the need to have the socialization of all the children of the people directed from on high. Nothing was to be left to chance. On the other hand, however, the reformed educational system had to include guarantees than education would not instill ambitions to aspire beyond the social milieu of the family of birth or the limits of gender. The ideal school system from this perspective would be both comprehensive (including a place for every child) and limiting (not allowing free movement among the various parts of it). The clientele for each institution would be preselected on the basis of the child's presumed destiny, in turn suggested by gender and class origin.

This was not the assumption of all reformers. As we have already seen, a vocal minority genuinely believed in meritocracy—that all were not equal, but everyone (or at least all boys) should be allowed to compete equally for positions of policial and social dominance. That schools might serve the function of selecting "natural" talent was a belief that formed a comparatively subversive undercurrent in the ideologies feeding school reform; occasionally it pushed to the surface in democratic proposals. Still, the school systems that evolved as a result of the reformist urge—and so far all studies of both design and consequence are in agreement on this point—tended to reproduce rather than challenge not only the class and gender system as a whole, but even the social status of individuals in that system. That is, school systems rested on the assumption that schooling was a means of preparing children for their destiny as given by their social position and gender. In some countries, this was openly incorporated into the overall structure of the school system; in others, it occurred more subtly. But it was true everywhere that schools neither primarily served, nor were they intended to serve, the function of individual mobility.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 91 - 92)

Eventually, the youngest children were evicted from elementary classrooms as these became overcrowded and as the presence of the very young came to be regarded as a detriment to orderly teaching. Age limits for enrollment were set at six or even seven years in many communities. Schooling began to be concentrated between the ages of six and twelve or thirteen. If some parents still placed their children in school early where permitted, they also withdrew them as soon as work was available.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 89)

That work and schooling were a trade-off, that work had to take priority for many families, becomes clear from an examination of evidence from the reform era about school attendance patterns and truancy. In general, older children were less likely to attend school than their younger siblings whose labor was not as valuable. Children were more likely to be absent from school in the summer than in the winter, more markedly so in rural than in urban communities. School enrollment and attendance patterns also reflected the gender division of labor among children and adults. By and large, schooling for sons was given priority where children of both sexes were not treated equally, no doubt a reflection of the belief that, insofar as literacy skills were useful, they were more so for boys than for girls... But where the local labor market offered relatively well-paid boys' labor, they attended less assiduously than girls. Of course, these patterns of differentiation in school enrollment and attendance according to age and sex among school-aged children pretty much disappeared as school attendance became almost universal toward the end of the nineteenth century.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 88)

The work of children in other occupations was less visible to authorities, but it also was in conflict with the increased schooling desired by reformers. Peasant families had a hard time sending children to school during seasons of intense labor. In the Vaucluse, "the desertion of the classroom began in May, the season of the silkworms, and lasted until November," when the gleaning of the fields was over. Even where school attendance was compulsory, impractical school hours forced parents to evade the law. In a letter he wrote to school authorities in 1840, a father from the North Baden community of Neidenstein asked for exemption from school fines imposed on him: "I am the father of eight young children, completely without wealth," he wrote. "My children missed school during the time when they had to earn their bread for themselves and their family, that is, during the harvest time when they were occupied with the gleaning...." Similarly, in Bavaria, according to one study, ''even if a teacher could get a magistrate to intervene in the case of a notorious evader [of the school laws], he might fill his classroom, but he would bring upon himself the bitter hostility of the community.... The teacher stood between the demands of the bureaucracy and the tough resistance of the community, between norms and actual social conditions" that demanded the participation of children in farm work.

Despite the frequency with which complaints such as these arose, child work was rarely recognized by authorities as a legitimate justification for absenteeism. Ambitious state efforts to enforce universal school attendance proceeded despite child labor. In a few areas, the assumption that children were important contributors to the family economy was, to a certain extent, built into the law and practice. In Baden, for example, schools were traditionally closed during the seasons of most intense agricultural work, and even when they began to stay open during the summer, the sessions lasted only an hour or two a day. This realistic program, based as it was upon an older sense of what schooling meant (that is, a limited experience designed primarily to teach familiarity with the Scriptures and the language needed to read them) was ironically part of the reason for the relatively early accomplishment of universal attendance in this area.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 86 - 87)

Indeed, the rural impoverishment that was a feature of the early industrial capitalist era forced peasant families to exploit all available labor power. Few families could survive on the produce of their lands; they had to send family members to work on the farms of wealthier neighbors or in the growing number of rural industries. In both rural and urban areas, children helped with cottage industrial pursuits. And in the developing areas of Europe, employment opportunities for children in the new factories added to the variety of jobs done by children.

Wherever child labor was necessary to the family economy, this reduced the time that the children had available for schooling. This was the more true, ironically, the more formal the schooling situation became. The growing insistence upon regular attendance and longer hours made a combination of work and schooling more difficult than it had been in the past.

This problem was explicitly recognized by the proponents of special schooling legislation for children employed in factories. School hours were becoming more established precisely at the same time as factory discipline made work hours more rigid as well. It was clear that unless special provisions were made for them, the children who worked in the factories could not attend school. And they were deemed more in need of schooling than almost anyone else. Despite the variety of approaches to schooling policy in Western European states in the reform period, it is significant that England, France, and Germany had all passed legislation making school attendance mandatory for child factory workers, and regulating the hours of work and schooling for this highly visible and threatening substratum of "the people." Needless to say, these early laws were virtually impossible to enforce since they ran up against the interests both of the proletarian families and of the entrepreneurs who relied on cheap child labor.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 86)

Reformers like von Rochow were sometimes surprised at the signs of hostility they encountered from parents of the children they were luring into their bright, clean, and orderly classrooms. The extent of the threat to the peasant home and work life that the new kind of classroom and of pedagogy represented was sometimes lost on the reformers. Similarly, religious authorities attempting to enforce school attendance in southwestern Germany in the late eighteenth century were shocked that parents in the countryside did not take schooling as seriously as they themselves did. "Out of pure stinginess or in order to save firewood [parents were] condemning their children to irreversible damage to body and soul by keeping them out of school." Later efforts of French inspectors to teach peasant families the value of formal schooling met with similar indifference or hostility. The smallholders of La Tour d'Aigues, wrote one inspector in the 1830s, "couldn't begin to understand the importance of schooling," and even as late as 1856, an inspector from this same region complained of "the indifference of some parents who do not want for their children a benefit whose advantages they cannot comprehend because they themselves are deprived of it."

At the heart of much of this indifference or opposition encountered by school reformers was the compelling fact that children had more important things to do than to go to school. The reports of school inspectors, local economic observers and others are filled with references to the children's labor. Although there are no statistics about child labor, in the rural context especially this work was simply an accepted part of the family routine; it is clear that the work that children did was essential to the family enterprise.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 85)

The work of historians like Thomas Laqueur and Margaret Spufford, for example, has suggested that even in popular cultures that placed a great emphasis on the written word, like that of early modern England, schooling remained a casual and peripheral institution. People learned to read and write without going to school at all, or by attending only sporadically for a short time. Even though the incentives to learn to read and write were, no doubt, multiplying toward the end of the ancien régime, it should not be assumed that sending children to school was a natural response to those incentives. We must keep in mind that the reform of the schools and the rising demand for literacy were simultaneous and connected, but not identical, processes. And even if literacy was increasingly useful in the late eighteenth century, nowhere was it commonly regarded as absolutely essential. The best evidence of this is in the patterns of the intergenerational transmission of literacy. Historians of literacy in both England and Germany have discovered that literate parents sometimes raised illiterate sons, and frequently raised illiterate daughters. There was a certain haphazard quality to the process of handing down the capacity to read and write, apparently not as highly prized as other more tangible components of the family heritage.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 84)

The motives for school reform in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Western Europe have been discussed so far from the perspective of those who observed the people "from above" and wished to change them. Inspectors and school officials, churchmen and entrepreneurs, aristocrats who undertook their own reforms and professionals who joined reformist societies were by no means an unified group. They had different ideas about the proper function of schooling, and about its reform. But what they did share was a position of economic independence, social superiority, and at least local political power that distinguished them from the popular classes and helped them to dominate the people toward whom their reforms were directed. They were concerned about "the people" but regarded them as a race apart.

As for "the people" themselves, what they thought about schooling is much harder to discern. Nevertheless, the pursuit of popular interest in and attitudes about schooling is a central concern for social historians of education. To be sure, the weight of historical evidence lies so heavily on the side of the upper class reformers that it is sometimes difficult to keep in mind that other classes were themselves active participants in the schooling process. But the nature of popular participation has to be a part of any interpretation of the meaning of school reform. What parents thought they were doing when they sent their children to school, how schooling served their interests or contradicted them, these problems are an important component of the history of schooling.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 83 - 84)