I never cared for school I’d rather work than go to school. They used to take us during school vacation if we were fourteen or fifteen. Then at sixteen you’d start steady work. We all expected to work in the mill … My parents did not believe in education.

(Tamara Hareven and Randolph Langenbach, Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory City in New England (London, 1979), p. 181)

My mother was hostile to ‘modern regulations’ of which compulsory education was one. She thought it unreasonable that other people should have the right to tell parents what to do with their children. On this point my father agreed … three years of school was enough according to my parents and what you had not learnt by the age of ten, you would never learn they repeated … I was not always able to go to school, I had to earn and every school day I missed was a workday with income. In the end my mother was sentenced to 24 days of incarceration because of my absences from school. One day two policemen came and took her to serve her sentence as she had not come of her own accord. This my mother never forgot, how a hardworking woman and good mother could be treated like that. I was so ashamed that I did not dare go out in the street.

(Adelheid Popp in Karin Roi Frey, Wenn alle Stricke reissen, dann wird sie noch einmal Lehrerin, Lehrerinnen in biographischen Zeugnissen (Bochum, 2001), pp. 111–12)

In 1896, more than 60,000 children between the ages of 11 and 14 worked in factories; in 1901 there were still more than 40,000 in this age group, including so-called half-timers. Source: p.p. 1902 XII, pp. 36–43.