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)