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)